[Wolves] DocBook XML editing for normal people

[Andy Wootton]

Mike Peters wrote:

>On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 11:31:28 +0000
>Schwuk <schwuk at schwuk.com> wrote:
>
>>n Sun, 2004-11-28 at 22:41 +0000, Andy Wootton wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>A couple of us recently discussed our failures to convince 'decision
>>>
>>>makers' that real people would be able to maintain DocBook XML
>>>documents.
>>>
>>>I've spotted this promising project that I intend to keep an eye on.
>>>
>>>http://www.conglomerate.org/
>>>      
>>>
>>I spotted that, and tried it. Looks OK as a docbook/XML editor, but is
>>lacking as an end-user editor.
>>
>>What we need is an editor that supports WYSIWYG editing of docbook
>>documents, outputs valid docbook, and displays according to attached
>>stylesheets. Basically OOo Writer or MS Word, but you can only select
>>the style (title, section etc) - not edit the style itself.
>>
>>This will allow people to generate docbook documentation with worrying
>>about the inner workings, and that is how we will sell it.
>>
>I don't know whether you've come across it before or whether it suits
>your needs, but there's LyX: http://www.lyx.org/
>
>It takes a bit of getting used to but once you're over the initial
>learning curve it's pretty good at what it does.
>  
>
Mike and Schwuk, Thanks. Yes and (mostly) no.

I don't believe it is possible to do WYSIWYG DocBook. I think the OOo
project to do just that lies aboandoned with good reason. DocBook
seperates content, structure and layout. The same source can have more
than one final form so there is no single WYG. I think LyX's web site
that says it has a 'What You See Is What You Mean' interface to replace
LaTeX's 'You Asked For It, You Got It'. The author should only be
interested in content (and possibly its structure) at the editing stage.
How the document will be layed out might be someone else's decision
either earlier or later in the publishing process. It might be possible
to base a WYSIWYM editor on a WP but you would need to remove much of
its functionality. It also leads to the expectation that you can save
e.g. all Word .docs as DocBook XML and you can't because the structure
information is missing. There are commercial products that attempt to
infer structure from styles and highlighting but I've hardly ever seen a
document where that approach would be effective.

I started off intending to use LaTeX and LyX before discovering that
people (and key projects) were moving to DocBook. Later I realised that
SGML was also being replaced by XML, making the water very muddy. I know
that LyX now has simple DocBook support but it fell short of what I
needed. I think the problem was either that it hadn't moved from SGML to
XML or it couldn't handle multiple source files. I'm quite happy using
an EMACS mode on X but when I demonstrated my working methods to a
Window$ monkey I could almost smell the fear. Strangely, mentioning
Cygwin didn't help.

Of course I haven't tried Conglomerate yet, so I'll prepare for 
disappointment.

Woo