Hi,

Can you provide information about MS Word SGML Author? Is it a Microsoft
product? Where can one obtain it?

If you are looking for other solutions, you can handle the entire
Word<-->SGML conversion process with FrameMaker+SGML. Open your Word source
files in FrameMaker (the same style clean-up is necessary here). Then use a
FM+SGML conversion table to map FrameMaker styles (which should match your
original word styles) to SGML elements.

I'm also evaluating a product called upCast (http://www.infinity-loop.de/)
for Word-to-XML conversions. This product is java-based
(platform-independent) and is free for personal use.

-Alan
----
Alan Houser, Principal
Group Wellesley
Documentation Services for Technology Industries
412-363-3481
www.groupwellesley.com
----- Original Message -----
From: John Hanratty/Towers Perrin <hanratj@...>
To: <xml-doc@egroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2000 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: [XML-DOC] Digest Number 5


>
>
> I've just joined this group, so apologies if this is old ground.
>
> I also had to convert legacy Word docs (to SGML). The difference is that
the
> people who create our content -- who are not professional writers -- still
use
> Word to write/edit the documents, so in addition to generating HTML for
> publishing to our users, we also have to output from SGML to Word.
>
> For this, we use MS Word SGML Author. It took us a while to get used to
its
> idiosyncrasies, but we can now convert Word docs to and from SGML pretty
easily.
> BIG CAVEAT: it doesn't handle equations at all well.
>
> The main thing we found was to make sure the original word docs were
> "structured" properly (e.g. no H1s were followed by an H3 without at least
one
> H2 in between) , and that styles, rather than manual formatting, were used
> *everywhere* (a lot of that can be done by simple search & replace).
>
> Once those things were cleaned up, the one-off conversion to structued
SGML
> (which can be edited in Frame + SGML, Adept Editor or wherever) was easy.
When
> we get new Word content, we paste it straight our SGML source files via
the
> Windows clipboard, adding the markup as we go, so after the initial
one-off
> conversion to SGML from Word, we only do down-conversions from SGML to
Word &
> HTML.
>
> I would like to know, though, if anyone else is in a similar situation,
and uses
> another means (maybe OmniMark?) to get from SGML to Word and vice versa,
as MS
> have said they will not be maintaining SGML Author beyond Office 97.