You have to "thank" Microsoft for this. For a long time they didn't
document their proprietary Word formats at all (there are several). And
what you get today is still very restricted. It takes a lot of bravery
to make sense out of this formats and to implement them. MS has
announced they want to push some Word format through some
standardization, but I doubt that they will disclose every detail and
provide enough information to implement the format.

The only software that can really handle the Word document formats is
Word. And even that one crashes on its own documents sometimes.

If you can, don't deal with the formats on Unix at all. Use some other
one, which is open, and "good enough" to represent your type of
document. Only in the last possible moment import that one into Word on
a Windows machine, and use Word to store it as a Word document. From
that moment on you treat the result as read-only and just store it
somewhere, "never" to be edited on Unix again.

Or shell out money for real Word licenses, and a terminal server
solution, so Unix users can open Word on some remote Windows machine.
Provide access to the Unix home directories via SAMBA on this Windows
machine, so Unix users can see the documents from their home directory
and can edit them.

/Thomas

I can understand it if POI is not a suitable solution (low
compatibility), but it should work on solaris. I think I used it a while
ago to generate excel files.
POI should be fine, specially if you don't have to make complex stuff.

Suggestion: use rtf format. It's Word's native and easy. And could be
easily transformed to web.
I don't know this format and how to do it. But I'm sure it's pretty
easy.
Alex.

Hi,

Microsoft has published XML Schema for its Word Documents. Its called
WordprocessingML

What you could do is,
1. Create a Word Document in  MS Word
2. Save it as Doc1.xml
3. Cut out parts like tables, sections,  that will be generally
repeated
4. Write Java Code to fill in the data at appropriate places in the xml
file
   thereby creating XML with appropriate data.
5. Join the XML pieces into one  MS Document
6. Change extension of file to Doc1.doc

Its a Lengthy Method  [A real headache].  The catch is that the
Document can open only in
MS Word 2003 for the First Time and the Save Button must be Clicked for
it to open in older versions of MS Word.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Abhay