Publishing DITA Technical Content to Microsoft Word

Descriptions

The complete scope is provided in the Contract Technical Specification entitled "Publishing DITA Technical Content to Microsoft Word". RWM has produced a generic Disposal System Safety Case (DSSC) to illustrate high-level disposal concepts in a variety of geological settings. At present all documents in the DSSC are written in Microsoft Word and are published in PDF format as standalone documents. There is a clear benefit to RWM and other stakeholders to be able to access this information in a more interactive hyperlinked form and RWM is therefore exploring means to moving to a more modern production process. As part of this update RWM intends to move to authoring safety case documents using a mark-up language, thereby allowing metadata to be captured with document contents. Such metadata includes the identification of information sources (e.g. relating a graph to the underlying dataset or model), quality or approval, and versioning information. A natural endpoint is the transition to a full electronic safety case, however at present RWM requires the ability to continue to produce paper based document submissions in addition to web-enabled versions (often referred to as single source publishing). A number of DSSC documents have now been converted to DITA and are available in both paper and HTML format. RWM has strict guidelines relating to the format of its published reports and all published documents must meet these guidelines. Associated with these guidelines is a Microsoft Word template which contains appropriate character, paragraph, table and numbering styles to meet these guidelines. At present RWM does not have any means to publish DITA content in a format consistent with these guidelines. The key objective of the work specified in the Contract Technical Specification (CTS) is to deliver a solution to RWM which converts technical DITA content into an appropriately styled Microsoft Word compatible DOCX/DOCM via a DITAMAP.