Advice sought: Word Styles to XML

[Travis McCauley <tw...@virginia.edu>]

Hello,

I'm a web developer for the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library 
(thdl.org). We have a big group of scholars who want to submit 
written content but have zero interest in ever learning to markup 
their work in XML. Their job is to write books and articles so they 
tend to be competent users of Microsoft Word.

Our current plan is to give them MS Word templates with a set of 
styles that map to our xml schema which is a very simple subset of 
TEI for marking up essays. So we need to convert styled word 
documents to structured xml.

Our original plan was to use VisualBasic to generate the XML but our 
VB guy is working on Tibetan Unicode right now and I don't know VB 
just Java.

 From the HDF documentation overview it seems like styles are the top 
priority so far. Would it be tricky to map a styled Word document to 
an xml tree? Is there anything (open-source/free) out there that does 
this already? OpenOffice?

Before I propose using HDF for this, could anyone give me some 
feedback if this seems doable at this time?  Also, how tough is the 
POIFS learning curve for someone with no experience with binary file 
formats?

Sincerely,
Travis McCauley
Charlottesville, VA