Hello,
This is what I understand about what you want to do:
- you receive "templates" from restaurants that designed them
themselves using either MS-Word or MS-Excel (one restaurant
sends one template that's specific to its needs and that
will ever only be used by this one restaurant)
- you want to transform the received files into actual
templates (meaning a general layout and variables), either
by using directly Office "Open" XML formats ("Option 1") or
transforming the templates into FO files ("Option 2")
- once this is done you'll be able to generate "on the fly"
wine lists using a database of wines and the specific template
of each restaurant.
You would also like to do this using XML / XSLT.
If the above is correct:
- I would not attempt Option 2 in any case; making an FO
template from a Word file that may include pics, specific
and maybe non-standard layout made from amateur designers
(ie, restaurant owners) is going to be very hard if not
impossible; it may be justified if there were some economies
of scale to be made (one template for many restaurants),
but not here (unless there is some kind of automatic
Word-to-FO tool that I'm unaware of?)
- Option 1 does not sound great either: XSLT is not a search
and replace utility (it transforms one tree into another
tree), and an Office XML file is composed of many files
in a zip package, that are not very easy to manipulate
- What I would try would be to use RTF; RTF files are simple
text files that can be manipulated with any ordinary
search and replace utility:
- save the templates received from restaurants into RTF
files, with specific variable names where needed
(Excel layouts can be first transformed to Word tables
before being saved to RTF)
- when generating a new wine list, search
and replace variable names with new values
Another approach many be to provide restaurants with a
general (and rather strict) layout that they may customize
(responsibly); if it is possible to impose this, Option 2
may make sense, because you'd have to develop the FO just
once; but if you need to give maximum freedom to
restaurants, I suggest you try the RTF solution.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
EB
-----Original Message-----
From: Schultz, Len [mailto:len(_at_)winequest(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 7:30 PM
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: [xsl] Word -> XSL
Hello,
I am building a web application that will allow restaurants to
easily create custom beverage (e.g. wine) menus utilizing a
central database of beverage products. Key to this is making it
really easy to have each restaurant specify and implement their
look and feel into their menus. The effort needs to be extremely
light weight: we'll have to do potentially 1000 different menu
templates for 1000 different restaurants. FYI, today 90% of
menus are done in MS Word, another 9% done in MS Excel, and the
remaining 1% is probably Adobe InDesign, Quark, and MS Publisher.
I want to implement this using XML and XSLT. The question I have
for this group is the plusses and minuses of 2 different targets
for the transformation.
Option 1 is to transform to WordML and SpreadsheetML. This has
the benefits of 1) having the restaurant send us their design in
Word/Excel, then all we have to do is create an XSLT to replace
the data. And 2) if there are changes or adjustments to make in
the layout, the restaurant can then make those changes in
Word/Excel, and we just create a new XLST.
Option 2 is to transform to XSL (aka XSL-FO). This has the
benefits that 1) we can transform to PDF, which would cover the
1% that don't have Word/Excel. And 2) we can keep people in our
system to make. But I don't know how we can easily create the
XSL from sample menus sent to us in Word. I also don't know what
kind of layout change process would work (our web application
might need to be robust enough to allow users to fine-tune layout
changes online)
I'd like to tackle the first issue first. Does anyone have
insights into how XSL could be created from a sample Word
document, and the effort involved in creating that XSL?
--len
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