During my time when we were working for HP (and before the time where Word could read/write xml files), I hacked together a collection of scripts for generating .doc files from simple markup xml. The scripts will convert the simple xml script (which can also be converted to html with xslt) and generate a OpenOffice xml from that, which is then combined into a standard template, zipped into sxw, routed through an OpenOffice instance with Uno, and saved to .doc.
It would have been easier if HP's "change request" documents didn't
have to be Microsoft Word (of all things!) but the xml->doc scripts
turned out to work pretty well.