Word Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Introduction: Hacks #90-100

Starting with Word 2003, you have a whole new way to access and
process the information in Word documents. If you select
FileSave As, you'll see a new
entry under "Save as type" called
"XML Document." XML (Extensible
Markup Language) provides a standard way to encode
informationdata, documents, and everything in betweenin
a readable text format. It is an interoperable, OS-independent
format, which means you can now process and generate Word documents
using applications other than Microsoft Word.

All of the hacks in this chapter require either the standard or professional version of Word 2003 for Windows.

XML lets you define your own "document
type" or
"vocabulary" suited to your
particular application or industry. For example,
DocBook is an XML vocabulary used extensively
for technical publishing. WordprocessingML is
Microsoft's XML format for Word documents. It is a
lossless format, which means it contains the same information
that's stored in the .doc
format, but in a plain-text XML format rather than a binary format
that only a computer can understand. Most of the hacks in this
chapter show you how you can use XML to gain powerful control over
your Word documents.

Beyond some suggestive examples, this chapter will not spend a lot of
time explaining WordprocessingML or how it works (or XML in general).
Instead, it focuses on the kinds of things you can
do with it, using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet
Language Transformations), a special programming language designed
for processing XML. For more complete coverage of WordprocessingML
and the other XML features of Office 2003, check out the following
books, all published by O'Reilly Media:

Office 2003 XML

Learning XSLT

Learning XML