Creating XML Documents in Word (Word 2003?)

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I have the latest version of MS Office, and need to create XML documents for a proprietary help interface. We have a DTD and an XSLT style sheet that we will use to parse the documents with. What I would LIKE to do is create a schema that would enable me to write in Word and apply the styles as defined in the DTD.

Am I dreaming, or is there a way to do this? I would rather use a more universal tool than DreamWeaver or FrontPage since these files may be altered by non-web developers.

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Word 2003 (pro) does support validation based on an arbitrary schema (W3C XML Schema), but not based on a DTD. You’d need to convert your DTD into a schema (check out http://thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang.html%5B/url%5D for one such conversion tool).

I’m unclear what you mean by “styles” defined in the DTD. A DTD specifies semantic rules for placement of XML elements and attributes, but doesn’t include any information about how the content should be presented.

What does your XSLT stylesheet transform your XML into? Word 2003 also allows you to apply an XSLT stylesheet when saving a document.

Before getting too deep into using Word as an XML editor, I’d strongly suggest reading “Office 2003 XML” (http://”http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/officexml/) to get a firm background in how XML works in Word.

You’re not dreaming when you ask if this is possible, but it is difficult, and requires an advanced understanding of XML and its related technologies (Schemas, DTDs, XSLT, RELAX-NG, etc.).

Good luck!

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Thanks for the reply!
This is a lot less fun than I thought it was going to be. I wonder if it would be easier to just publish xml docs from Word and have the proprietary tool parse the data and display it–in other words do the heavy lifting with the application rather than get fancy with Word…I will talk with my developers and see what we can do.

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