As with most software, what you get out of the box is never exactly what you want, so you have to tweak the preferences, settings and if you're a hacker, maybe even the code.

With DTDs, it is also the same. Thankfully, Norm Walsh designed DocBook with modularity and customization layers in mind. The problem is that many XML editors don't like DTDs with external parameter entities or entity references, and want them flattened.

Here are a few DTD flatteners you can try, should you need to create your own customization layers, or need a flattened DTD:

• http://www.cowtowncoder.com/proj/dtdflatten/
• http://www.nwalsh.com/perl/flatten/
• http://freshmeat.net/projects/nekodtd/
• http://xmlbuddy.com/2.0/features.html
• http://www.tei-c.org/Software/carthage/#index-div-c16b1b4b4b6

Hopefully this will give you some options. I've had the best luck with the dtdflatten and flatten.pl programs on Solaris.

There was a posting to the docbook-apps list at Oasis about a standard word template where the styles map to a docbook element (even if not 1:1) so that only one stylesheet need be written to convert the output to Simplified Docbook.

Dan Gilleland replied that even though it's for Simplified, it can be extended to full DocBook. He posted the link to O'reilly's site, where you will find:

Microsoft Word for the PC or Mac, tagged according to our paragraph and character style template that is available at ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/frame/templates/mswd/temp98.doc. Note that you should also be able to use this template for programs such as OpenOffice and StarOffice.

Thank you to Uratsuki for the link correction: ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/frame/templates/mswd/.

I've got to try this in OO, and will report back...