I'm evaluating XMLmind for the creation of technical documentation (having previously experimented with it as an author for O?Reilly), and am extremely impressed with how seamlessly the Professional Edition wraps up the toolchain for turning DocBook XML into HTML and PDF. I do expect to purchase a license soon. But I have run into a couple of minor snags I?d like to report.
The first one seems to be a bug, which I hope can be fixed easily in a future release. I needed to change my paper size to US Letter for PDF generation, and found instructions online that pointed me at Options ? Customize Configuration ? Change Document Conversion Parameters? I added a paper.type parameter to the ?Convert to PDF, PostScript? group, and all was fine. (Incidentally, I?m very impressed with how cleverly this dialog links to the DocBook XSL online documentation.) The problem occurred when I left the editor and relaunched it later. Upon opening my DocBook document, I was greeted with the attached error message (in case the attachment doesn?t make it through the mailing list, a the content reads: ?Cannot load customization of configuration "DocBook" from "/Users/jim/Library/Application Support/ XMLmind/XMLEditor4/custom/~44oc~42ook/conf": file /Users/jim/Library/ Application Support/XMLmind/XMLEditor4/custom/~44oc~42ook/conf: 1:42:Parse Error: Invalid encoding name "MacRoman".? (I am using XXE on a Mac, latest OS and Java versions.) And sure enough, my custom document conversion parameter settings were missing. By opening that configuration file in a text editor, and changing the encoding declaration to "UTF-8", I was able to launch XMLmind and successfully open my DocBook document, retaining my custom parameter settings. But I should not have to do that; I didn't ask XMLmind to save that document with a MacRoman encoding; there's no reason I'd want anything other than UTF-8 for my own documents, let alone internal documents used by the application. Can this be fixed in the future? Until then is there a workaround I can apply to prevent it happening? Or do I have to keep tweaking these documents in a text editor? As an aside, the file name is weird. Why encode the capital D and B in "DocBook" as "~44oc~42ook"? Can that be fixed too? The online descriptions of manual customization I found suggested the directory should be named more readably. Thanks, -Jim -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: cap001.png Type: image/png Size: 25731 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.xmlmind.com/pipermail/xmleditor-support/attachments/20090123/6fcbc675/attachment.png -------------- next part --------------
