On 2010-12-20 16:56, Edmund R. MacKenty wrote:
On Monday, December 20, 2010 09:51:33 am John McKown wrote:
I never got into emacs. I'm more a vim person. But I really want a mixture
of gvim+pdf/xedit. Or more like pdf or xedit with Perl regular expressions
for find and replace. I've tried THE, but it seems to be just different
enough to frustrate me. I liked Kedit on MS-DOS quite a bit. Hum, wonder
if I can find that old software and run it in DosBox?
I use Emacs too, because I like to see the markup as I work. But then again,
I do everything in Emacs. :-) If you're not into it, check out some of the
editors listed on the DocBook Wiki:
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookAuthoringTools
What about org-mode ? An extremely simple, yet powerful outline mode
that allows you to focus on writing text instead of worrying about
syntax. It has sophisticated export options (latex, pdf, etc).
I use it all the time for writing documentation ... and for about
everything else, too :-)
David already said most of the things I thought of when I read your first
message, so here's just a couple of other ideas...
For SGML DocBook -> PDF or HTML conversions, I used a command-line tool named
OpenJade, because I'm building docs as part of an automated build process. It
uses DSSSL stylesheets to do the conversion. For XML DocBook, I used xsltproc
and some XSLT stylesheets. I had little problem switching to XML DocBook,
despite having used the SGML version from way back. There's some decent GUI
tools (like DocMan) for doing XML conversions.
These days I'm authoring in the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA),
which is yet another XML framework you might consider. It's got a simplier
structure than DocBook, and allows you to extend it to handle your specific
needs. I'm using the OpenDITA toolkit which comes with decent stylesheets to
do the conversions. But the free version is rather cryptic to use, so I wrote
some shell wrapper scripts (dita2pdf, etc.) to make it simple. I should be
able to share them. It wasn't too hard to move my sources and tools from
DocBook to DITA.
Thanks. I guess I was "misled" because the DocBook 5 stuff seemed to say,
to me, that SGML is the "old way" and all new documents should use the XML
stuff instead.
I have to agree with that, as fond as I am of SGML. XML is much easier to
process, so more people are writing tools using it. When you're authoring,
though, there's little difference between the two except for the DOCTYPE and
document element in your top-level file and XML allows the short form of
content-less elements (ie.<foo/>).
- MacK.
-----
Edmund R. MacKenty
Software Architect
Rocket Software
275 Grove Street - Newton, MA 02466-2272 - USA
Tel: +1.617.614.4321
Email: m...@rs.com
Web: www.rocketsoftware.com
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