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?"
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.
One of the great things about XML is that it's human-readable and -writeable. You don't need a WYSYWIG editor, because you can just edit it directly. Once again, we find that open standards are superior to the proprietary alternatives pushed by the likes of Microsoft and Sun.
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.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
The only problem I see is that Docbook doesn't have a visual representation, it has many, depending on the backend you want (HTML, PDF, PS, TXT, etc.). So a WYSIWYG editor would only show one type of representation.
Besides, Docbook (as many other document formats) is meant to separate the visual from the info. Linking the visual to the edition would only make people try to make it present the info in (what they beleive to be) pretty layout, when Docbook's goal is to concentrate on the structure of the document, which the backend then translates to HTML tags, or PDF fonts and layout, etc.
I agree, you don't really want a WYSIWYG editor for docbook, as that violates the Information/Representation sepperation.
But what would be _really_ useful would be a structured editor, which provided a good mapping at several levels (ala Mozilla's composer, where I can turn on and off tabs). The point of such an editor's representation would not be for final production, but to unambigously display the information's _structure_ to the user, and to facilitate manipulating that structure.
It would be like a very ugly word processor, where the tables would always have borders, etc.
If that editor was then linked with a set of generation tools, to make it EASY to genearte and view PostScript, HTML, XHTML, etc. productions, then you'd really have something. I'd use it, for sure, and I don't mind using docbook tags now.
In fact, would mozilla's composer be a good place to start with a docbook editor? Mozilla has good DOM tools, like the inspector, which loads XML DocBook files just fine.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
growl
http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ Not sure what the license is.
English, please.
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.
Right from the i4i website:
Quote-
No proprietary word processing interface; it's Microsoft Word
* Your end-users can continue to generate content in the same environment they always
-end quote
But this is complete BS. MS word is not proprietary? Yes all end-users are using word.
Most of the tech writers I know abhor MS Word. I really don't like MS word either. It's annoying in that it attempts to be "smart".
Not to bag too hard on i4i, but making preposterous claims doesn't help the product IMO.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
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
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
try LyX - http://www.lyx.org/ . Best pocument processor ever, straight to the point. Enables you to write good looking dokuments in no time. Word - eat my dust.
jEdit is an open-source Java text editor that supports XML tag completion and DTD validation, ensuring that you can enter DocBook XML without having to continually refer to the documentation. I use it a lot on Mac OS X, IRIX and Linux. It's not the fastest (being Java) but it works well and ensures that I spend more time writing documentation than reading other documentation.
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.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Try XmlMind XML Editor (XXE for short) from http://www.xmlmind.com. It's not open source, but it is completely free if all you want to do is edit docbook documents.
I also looked at ArborText and FrameMaker. They claimed to support DocBook, but they supply config files only for (much) older DocBook versions. I found the out-of-the-box support for docBook to be sorely lacking. It looked like it was possible to configure them for better support, but it would have taken many hours to do so.
XML Spy and XMetaL looked pretty good. I don't remember how well they did with DocBook, but they are geared more for data-oriented XML, whereas Morphon and XXE are more suited for document-oriented XML, such as DocBook.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Anyone has experience with these? (or others that are missing from the list).
I haven't used it much, but FrameMaker does just that. It does XML or SGML, and, as I understand it, you just have to give it the DocBook DTD to do DocBook -- and then you can save as HTML, RTF, etc.
I've heard it called "A document formating program masquerading as a desktop publishing program".
Of course, that said, I don't actually use it myself, mostly because there's no Mac OS X version, and it's pretty darned expensive for personal use. Such a shame.