That thesis mentions "le-tex" (le-tex transpect - le-tex publishing services):
le-tex’s decision, firstly to work with accepted standard technologies, and secondly to make the products open source, removes all these risks for the customer. This applies to converters from?/?to XML-based formats such as .docx, IDML, EPUB, HTML, DocBook, TEI and NLM?/?JATS?/?BITS and extensions, e.?g., in order to check PDF and image files.
Like Peter, I'm also curious why you believe this would be a good solution. "Less complexity (less table and figure)" means exactly nothing. Unless your target document is extremely basic in its formatting (think "phone book" -- one line per entry, fixed number of entries per page), it simply must be faster+cheaper+easier to just load the Word document into InDesign.
