Need help in starting out at single sourcing in Word 2003/XML

[amakeler]

Hi all,

First of all, since I have just joined this group I want to say
thanks and congrats to all members, especially the main contributors,
for maintaining such a useful and active group.

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I have heard that instead of conjuring up all sorts of workarounds to
do conditional text in Word, now that Word 2003 saves as xml, all
these workarounds shouldn't be needed anymore.

I have to look into this since I can now no longer ignore the need of
my client's documentation to be able to hold multiple versions of a
document as a single source. (The client is trying to ignore the
need, but I can't...) Fortunately my client's PC now has Word 2003.
(Unfortunately, I can't yet do Microsoft's online Word-XML tutorial,
whatever it's worth, since I find my client's n/w is blocking
access). Anyway, I need some pointers on a something that could help
me leap forward.

I assume that I can design the XML version of my document, with some
sort of "if-then-else condition", or something similar, so that I
can 'output' the result document depending on my choice of condition.
So, I have just started learning XML more seriously (from a great
site called http://www.w3schools.com, which I have used to learn
X/HTML and CSS). But just so I can know what I am looking for, I
suppose I should be looking for some type of CONDITION tag? And what
would that be called? Do you by any chance have any link to a
description of such an XML feature? And especially as far as this
pertains to Word? Or am I in the wrong direction?

In general, where can I find more information - both in quantity and in
detail - about Word/XML (WordML)?

Btw, I hope I don't need to become expert in XML before being able to
manage single sourcing in xml , or there are going to be problems...
Looking at XML, I can see that it is a larger subject than I first
thought.

tia

Avi
Technical Writer

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Avi

I have heard that instead of conjuring up all sorts of workarounds to
do conditional text in Word, now that Word 2003 saves as xml, all
these workarounds shouldn't be needed anymore.

[..]

I'm not quite sure what use XML per se (especially Word 2003's flavour
of it) is going to help in your troubles: it's one huge XML file, after all.

For language-specific versions, the best promise I see on the horizon is
Word 2007's setup: a *.docx file is actually a zip folder, containing
mostly XML files with parts of the text, relationship definitions, etc.
With _that_, you might be able to totally separate the content (in
language A) from the rest that makes a Word file. You can then, say, in
a database, manage the 2nd, 3rd, etc. language texts, and dynamically
exchange the parts you need in the *.docx.

I don't say it's not feasible to do that in 2003 *.xml, but it's a lot
more programmatical work.

0.2¢
Robert