WYSIWYG Editor for DocBook DTD Content?

Saqib Ali asks: "This week I saw a demo of the Tagless Editor by i4i. The editor is a plugin to Microsoft Word, which can be used to create XML based content. The plugin can handle various custom DTDs. However it can not properly handle the DocBook DTD. I was wondering if there is any WYSIWYG XML editor that can be used to edit DocBook DTD based content? Any ideas?"

Comments

Conglomerate, maybe?

[DeadMoose]

I was looking for the same thing not too long ago, and came across Conglomerate, which despite its web page, is no longer dead, and back under development.

I've had a few problems getting it compiled/running well, but from what I've seen, it looks like it's a fairly decent bit of code, so once it gets some polish, it could be pretty handy.

have you tried

[Hubert_Shrump]

LyX? I know it's not a true WYSIWYG, but it does have a DocBook mode. I haven't tried it in awhile (went back to xemacs), but it might have all sorts of new goodies.

XMLMind

[jdurham]

http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ Not sure what the license is.

Re:not necessary

[GigsVT]

The presentation is more than just typefaces and formatting, in docbook it goes as far as what gets put on what HTML page, and how they are linked together, or even if some structures are omitted from the presentation.

You have one docbook file that get broken up into make multiple HTML files, or a single TXT file, or whatever.

You designate sections/chapters/whatever, and the presentation decides how to parse those. The point is that only the structure of the document is defined, nothing is assumed about presentation. Nothing at all!

A tool could be developed to assist this, by basically making sure you don't nest improperly, or use tags in an invalid context, or even give you a hint about what some things will look like on the final output using a common style sheet, but ultimately there is no way to approach even close to WYSIWYG.

And no offense intended likewise, but the "average person" shouldn't be trying to write XML documents if they can't understand the concept of seperating content from presentation.

XMetal

[Ovidius]

If buying it isn't a problem, XMetal works pretty well for DocBook. You can view your document as a tree (i.e., structured); with minimal block formatting and visible tags; as something like WYSIWYG, formatted with a CSS stylesheet; and, preview it as HTML in browser (IE for sure -- I don't know if you could get it to use Mozilla) formatted with an XSL stylesheet. The new version adds PDF preview which I assume is done through XSL-FO, but I haven't used it.

It's not the fastest or smoothest editor to use, but it does a good job of balancing the spirit of XML with the niceness of seeing formatted text as you work.

There is a commercial product to avoid..

[molo]

We use a commercial product to do this at work. It is called Epic, and is available from Arbortext. We've had some real problems with it though, so I think our tech writers are moving to a plain ascii editor. I can't recommend it, but I thought I would provide a data point.

Good luck.

-molo

Re:jEdit support DocBook

[Big Sean O]

Yep, jEdit is a total pig. It's slow, takes forever to load, and is quite simply the best free XML editor I've ever used. I know it's not magic, but it does the following really well:

• When I start a tag, it opens a contextural menu that displays all the valid tags.
  
• As I type the name of the tag, the list changes until I get the unique tag I want.
  
• When I type a close-tag, it fills in the close-tag information.
  
• It's XML validator does a pretty good job and has the sensible trait of stopping after listing 100 errors.
  
• Poorly-formed and invalid XML is redlined, like a spelling mistake.
  

I don't think it's productive to get into a match about XML/WYSIWIG. I like structured XML editors (like XML Spy). They definitely have their place, I especially like the table format. But for 60% of my XML-editing needs I'll be quite happy with a text editor with syntax coloring (ahh, BBEdit).

I guess it's all about the tools. The right tool in the right place. And for me, when I'm writing a DocBook, it's jEdit. It's not perfect, but it's the best tool I got.

OpenOffice

[Matts]

Try OpenOffice. My company sells an XSLT based filter that will turn OpenOffice documents (if using sensible styles) into DocBook XML. You may have to tweak it a bit to get exactly what you desire, but that's going to be the case with any tool.