Webucator uses an XHTML-based courseware system. At publishing time, we compile all the lessons, written in XHTML, into a single large XML file and then we use XSLT/XSL-FO to create a PDF.

We are now planning to submit several of our courses to the Microsoft Courseware Library. To do so, we need to get them into Microsoft Word. It would be a ton of work to convert them manually and then we would have to keep both version in sync.

So, I dove into WordProcessingML. I’ve looked at it several times before, but always walked away after an hour or two of frustration. This time, I pushed further as we now have a real incentive to get it working. It’s actually kind of cool. Maybe I’ll write a WordProcessingML course someday? Interested?

Anyway, right now I’m struggling with an XSLT problem that I hope someone might be able to help me with.

I’m starting with the following code from my source XML:

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<p>
	Some text and inline elements.
	<img/>
	Some more text and inline elements
</p>

And here’s my desired output:

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<w:p>
	<w:r>
		<w:t>Some text and inline elements.</w:t>
	</w:r>
</w:p>
 <w:p>
	<w:pPr>
		<w:jc w:val="center"/>
	</w:pPr>
 	<w:r>
		<w:drawing>
		...
		</w:drawing>
	</wr>
 </w:p>
 <w:p>
 	<w:r>
 		<w:t>Some more text and inline elements.</w:t>
 	</w:r>
</w:p>

The issue is that the image needs to appear centered on a block by itself. I know there’s WordProcessingML markup for doing that within a paragraph, but I haven’t been able to get that to behave correctly even while working in Word 2010 directly.

In XSL-FO, this isn’t a problem, because you can simply nest one fo:block in another fo:block, but in WordProcessingML, that’s not allowed.

The above “Desired Output” markup works correctly in Word (meaning it displays like I want it to), but it’s an XSLT challenge.

Essentially, what I need is this:

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<xsl:template match="img">
	</w:p>
	<w:p>
		<w:pPr>
			<w:jc w:val="center"/>
		</w:pPr>
		<w:r>
			<w:drawing>
			...
			</w:drawing>
		</w:r>
	</w:p>
	<w:p>
</xsl:template>

But, of course, that’s not well-formed XML, so it chokes.

Anybody know of a solution for this sort of problem?