Soft breaks in WordProcessingML

The WordProcessingML has an “interesting” way of representing soft breaks (Ctrl-Enter in Word): if a range (w:r, also called run) has a w:br child, it represents a soft break at that position (see also Section 2.3.3 of Part 4 of ECMA-376). Here is the XML Notepad display of a sample three-line paragraph (with two soft breaks):To process the soft break in a range with XSLT, use templates similar to these:

<xsl:template match="w:r">
  <xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="w:t"><xsl:value-of select="text()" /></xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="w:br|w:cr"><br /></xsl:template>

Using WordProcessingML to Generate Clean HTML from Word

Generating clean and simple HTML output from Microsoft Word is very difficult if you rely on its "Save As Web Page" feature. In my InformIT article, Using WordProcessingML to Generate Clean HTML from Word, I'm describing how you can use WordProcessingML together with XSL transformations to generate clean, strict (X)HTML-compliant documents from Word sources.