That's interesting - MSDN has published "Transforming Word Documents into the XSL-FO Format" article by Alexei Gagarinov (RenderX) and Mark Iverson (Microsoft). The article introduces WordprocessingML and XSL-FO vocabularies and shows how to transform Word documents to into XSL-FO using developed by RenderX Word2FO.xsl stylesheet. That stylesheet is available in the article's download and supports rich enough but currently a bit limited subset of WordprocessingML/XSL-FO features, btw it does support images.
That's quite unusual for Microsoft to even mention XSL-FO, usually they just ignore it.
Another interesting tidbit. As Kevin Brown of RenderX told me in a private mail (I think I can quote him):
The style sheets and extra tools are available for download through this link. We will be creating a new website section for them and for suggestions for improving them. This coupled with the Microsoft XSL tool we have been using makes a decent environment for using Word as an XSL Designer for XSL FO applications.Hmm, good move, I like it. XSL-FO desperately needs visual designer. Antenna House is developing something called "XSL Report Designer", to be released really soon, but who need it if you can use old good Word? And also Antenna sells WordMLToFO Stylesheet for just $980. That's not a price that can make a technology really popular, we need a cheap (preferably free) Word to XSL-FO conversion, that's gonna boost XSL-FO as a technology.
You can try a trial of some PDF to Word software
to see if taking your documents and converting PDF to Word
will make things more easily formatted than before the PDF conversion
helped you to do a convert PDF to Word
operation.
I can see that this post is quite old, but if there any people looking into this, there are quite a few tools out there able to edit XSL-FO. We are using XF Designer from Ecrion http://www.ecrion.com/Products/XFDesigner/Overview.aspx which has a nice drag & drop interface. At $795 is quite a bargain and pretty powerfull - you can edit templates including XSL-FO 1.1, use scripts, etc.
i have used a good microsoft word tool
http://www.sharewarecheap.com/business-finance-word-processing/wordtoys9051-2.htm
Look here - http://fo2wordml.sourceforge.net
Is There is any style sheet to convert from XSL-FO to word document or WordML ?
Related: Example of a Java app dynamically producing WordML. I used Word as the designer. Simple & Easy.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dotnetinterop/archive/2005/03/29/403331.aspx
I've also been using Altova's StyleVision ($1,000)& Assentis DocDesigner ($5,000) to create XSLT stylesheets - essentailly Word Templates suitable for mail-merge. If I could do this in Word, then, oh, what a happy boy I'd be!
So WHEN will this Word tool be available? Soon?
What I'd really LOVE is a fusion of Word & Visual Studio - because I want to design templates using reusable sub-templates - like embedding a custom control in a Windows form - because we have 100s of similar templates & we don't want to spend weeks copying & pasting nearly the same elements from template to template - now THAT would be a perfect product - and when it's in Word, then the Kingdom of Heaven will be at hand!