Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Windows editor for DocBook XML that does not messwith files?

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com> writes:

> On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 07:14:39PM -0500, Dan York wrote:
> > So... in order to bring her up to speed the quickest, I would like
> > to find a Windows GUI editor that she can use to work with
> > DocBook XML. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> 
>   I have seen people familiar with Arbortext tools being really really
> efficient with them when doing W3C specifications editing, that was
> the most impressive demo I ever saw of Windows oriented editing tools
> with a Markup orientation. But since they were long time users
> of the tools, this may not mean that it's easy to use them as a
> beginner. Softquad tools should be looked at too.

But Epic (Arbortext) or Xmetal (Softquad) both might fall short of
meeting Dan's criteria of "not messing with files", because both will
munge whitespace/indenting in your source when you go to save a file,
instead of preserving whatever you had before you loaded the file.

Xmetal at least seems to do a pretty good job of indenting the source,
so it's still readable in a text editor after a save.

But Epic doesn't seem to make any attempt at saving the source with
any indenting at all. So if you open up an Epic-saved XML document in
a regular ole text editor like Emacs or Vim, you're not going to find
it very easy to read at all. It also seems to quietly add processing
instructions here and there.

So for folks working in enviroments like the one Dan described -- some
people using text editors, others using WYSWIG/GUI editors -- Epic and
Xmetal both might be problematic.

It would be really nice if their off-the-shelf products offered the
option of not changing any whitespace in your source, but as far as I
can tell, neither do at this point.