Stylesheets for converting Microsoft's WordprocessingML documents to XSL FO (XSLFO)

Publicly available stylesheets can be used to convert Microsoft's WordprocessingML documents to XSL FO (XSLFO)

Note: Update is NOT yet available from Microsoft Download Center.

Background

These stylesheets were prepared by RenderX's development team and Microsoft for general use. They are used to convert documents in Microsoft's WordprocessingML XML vocabulary into documents in the W3C's XSL FO (XSLFO) vocabulary. These generic stylesheets produce XSL FO (XSLFO) suitable for RenderX XEP Engine. Also included is an add-on stylesheet to support RenderX-specific extensions such as mapping Microsoft Word's "continuous section break" into RenderX's "flow-section" extension.
It is also now possible to include barcodes into your documents through using of the MS Word smart-tags functionality.
These stylesheets are available for download. You can also get it from this page directly (see form on the left).
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Possible Use

Microsoft made customizing Microsoft Office Word documents much easier and simpler when it introduced the new XML file format called WordprocessingML with Microsoft Office Word 2003. WordprocessingML is an XML vocabulary representing Word document constructs. The flexibility of XML allows one to export content seamlessly from a Word document using XML expressions of the objects found therein.
The WordprocessingML schema also provides easy access to the contents of Word documents without programming effort or knowledge of the internal binary format of a Word document.
As XSL FO (XSLFO) is an XML vocabulary created when applying an XSLT stylesheet to an XML structured document, RenderX and Microsoft decided to release transforms to create XSL-FO documents from Word documents saved in WordprocessingML. Coupled with Microsoft's XSLT Inference Tool, one has a significant set of tools that leverage the flexibility of Microsoft Word as an XSL design environment, combined with the power of XSLT and XSL FO (XSLFO) for high-performance and high-quality rendered output.

Technical Notes

Both XSL FO (XSLFO) and WordprocessingML are expressive XML vocabularies for describing richly-formatted content. Their respective scopes overlap but do not match precisely. Therefore, in order to achieve the highest fidelity in layout patterns it is important to have a clear understanding regarding the capabilities and limitations when transforming documents from one format into the other. The Microsoft MSDN technical article provides an overview of these differences, and includes some formatting tips for Word users to follow in order to achieve the highest visual fidelity available.