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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.
Except for the fact that it's really convenient to not have to edit the raw XML. Yes I can, but I really don't want to; I'd much rather save myself that agrivation and just write what I'm trying to write.
It's just like a lot of other things that people go "well, you can do it manually, so why do you need a fancy tool?" about. Yes, I can manually patch/build/blahblah my own kernel. Do I want to? No, I want to just have things work. Same story here: do I want to sit here remembering what all the docbook tags are? No. Did I want to learn them in the first place? No. There's a time and a place for good tools to make tedious tasks easier.
Just because I could edit a file and manually set all the colors for all the pixels, doesn't mean there's no need for Photoshop/The Gimp.
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!
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>
You are missing the point, the whole point is to seperate the content from presentation.
No offense intended, but I think it is you who is missing the point. The average person doesn't think in XML. The average person thinks in formatted text. When I'm writing, I don't think "<ital>foo</ital>," I think "foo." Being able to see foo on the screen, but get "<ital>foo</ital>" in the output is a big win.
I'd go as far as to say that it's entirely impossible to have such a Docbook editor, since you have pretty much no say in the presentation when you write it.
Oh, sure you can. The editor doesn't need to display it the exact same way the end-user will display it; it just needs to display it in a way that makes the user feel comfortable. On your machine, chapter titles are 24 point serif type; on mine, they're 18 point italic sans-serif type. I don't care that yours are different from mine; I only care that mine look the way I expect them to.
I write in my journal
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Ok then. Why should foo be italicized? Is it important? Is it an example some something? A variable? A citation? A proper name? A bit of sarcasm? Maybe you just *like* the way italics look and don't really mean anything more by it. Then, perhaps "<ital>foo</ital>," is something of a win. But if "foo" means more than that, then "<ital>foo</ital>," actually loses that meaning.
But that's not really WYSIWYG then, is it? (Unless you want to get all semantic about the Ys in the acronym.) The thing is, if you lobotomize the meta-data so that what you create as a <chapter title> is encoded as <ital>, then you are pretty much forcing the hand of my machine. Your "big win" becomes my loss. Sure, I can remap <ital> so that it renders as 24 point serif, but then everything else that you've flattened down to <ital> for the sake of how it looks (footnotes, dates, marginal commentary, etc.) gets the 24 point serif treatment, too.WYSIWYG for DocBook? You're gonna need a bigger wrench if you want to pound in that screw.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.