Re: Authoring Tools WAS: Switching to XML

> "Authoring Tool" means "not always hand-editing tags". Right now, I can't
> do anything with Emacs SGML that I couldn't do with Wordpad or Pico,
> except validate.

That is certainly not true. Emacs will correctly associate your tags
without having to write those tags, if you use Emacs correctly. As will
Bluefish.

http://www.commandprompt.com/community/emacs_sgml/x108

Bluefish is a little easier with this IMHO but it gives the same
capabilities.

>
> Let me give you an example of a doc change which needing to hand-edit SGML
> prevented me from making: I wanted to clean up runtime.sgml by adding an
> alpha index, and clearly breaking out data like defaults, set time, etc.
> This meant changing 70% of the document, including some significant
> re-arranging.
>
> After 5 hours of editing, I discovered that I was only 1/3 done ... and
> that there had been incompatible changes in CVS in the meantime. I gave
> up.

Well the CVS issue will be one that always exists.

>
> If the docs were WYSWYG-editable or if we had any authoring tool which
> would automatically fix tags,

O.k. well you will you lost my support here. I guarantee you I would not
submit patches if I had to work with problems associated with doing
things in OpenOffice.Org format. I would not have a problem helping get
a clean up script together that would work with Docbook output from
OpenOffice.org though.

Docbook is specifically designed for technical documentation.

> I would have been able to make the changes
> and submit a patch in < 4 hours, not 15 hours+ it would have taken to
> complete the project.

Wait... You want a tool to automatically fix tags? You do need to know
Docbook to write the docs JoshB. That means you need to know which tags
are relevant to what. Something like emacs will make this easier because
it will tell you what tags are valid for each section of the document
you are in.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

>
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