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jfdill_2
March 3rd, 2006, 01:24 PM
About five years ago, I wrote my thesis in DocBook SGML, but haven't done much with DocBook since then. I'm trying to find out what is the current state of GUI tools and web engines for DocBook SGML and XML. I'll follow up here myself as I find out stuff.

Tools that I used in the past:
* LyX
* emacs psgml mode
* jade
* some CD from the TeX Users Group (TUG)

Abiword now sounds promising.

I'm saving some links as I find info in the DocBook Topic (http://www.furl.net/members/jfdnerds?enc=UTF-8&search=browse&sort=&dir=&pos=&keyword=&x=25&y=11&category=675101&date=0) of my furl.net archive.
DocBook Wiki (http://doc-book.sourceforge.net/homepage/) looks very interesting
SilkPage (http://silkpage.markupware.com/) also interesting, but requires Java, and I'm not sure about the licensing
C-Abre (http://c-arbre.pacageek.org/espaces/portal.php?carbre_Session=bbf58f6aab352c541343da0c 2e3c4b42) looks very cool

toojays
March 4th, 2006, 12:45 AM
It's been a while since I used DocBook, but I found emacs nxml-mode to be much more useful than psgml-mode. That does of course mean that you need to use DocBook XML rather than DocBook SGML.

jfdill_2
March 9th, 2006, 03:34 PM
I just found this web page on using DocBook in OpenOffice, through import and export filters. It's a bit out of date for OOo 1.X from 2005-03-25, but may still be relevant. I'm going to give it a shot with OOo 2.0 and see what happens.

http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/OpenOffice

Link to relevant OOo XSLTs and template http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/index.html

Hmm I'm using Dapper, and it looks like all the relevant XSLTs are already set up in OOo2 so the import filter should work, but when I open a DocBook XML document, it shows as a text file with all of the tags :/

jfdill_2
March 29th, 2006, 12:20 AM
Quanta seems very nice. I found this tutorial from the KDE project on using Quanta to edit DocBook documents:

http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/tutorials/quanta-docbook/quanta.html

A couple notes for Ubuntu users: You will also want kdelibs4-dev (on Dapper, not sure what the pkg is called on Breezy) for the checkXML script and kdelibs-bin for meinproc. xmllint seems nicer for checking XML than checkXML, but it is nice just having to click the button to run checkXML from Quanta.

I have also been playing with jEdit and SciTE. SciTE has a habit of crashing nastily on Dapper, but jEdit works just fine.

http://www.jedit.org
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

jfdill_2
April 7th, 2006, 03:31 AM
I made a Wiki page with lots more information!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocBookEditors

Sincerely,
Chronic Triple Poster

dpm
April 7th, 2006, 05:00 PM
Hi,

since I've been researching a bit about DocBook in the last few weeks, I thought I'd post my 2c on this.

I must say that I've mainly been experimenting with DocBook XML, which seems to be more "modern" than the SGML version.

About editors:

I've tried conglomerate and mlview as native XML editors under Linux. Both of them seem fine, although quite buggy at this stage. I haven't been able to finish a single document before they would crash. In this case, I prefer to use emacs in nxml-mode.

Last week I found this other WYSIWYG DocBook editor called xxe Standard Edition (or XMLMind XML Editor, at http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/). The standard edition is free, although you will need java to get it running (it is a multiplatform editor). It looks really really good to me, and I especially like the WYSIWYG aspect of editing a DocBook document. What I also liked is that it didn't need to be compiled for installation. Simply untar the archive in a folder and run the executable. You might want to have a look into it.

I didn't have a look at commercial editors, but I must try OpenOffice for exporting into DocBook.

Regarding other tools, you will find, amongst others, these packages to be useful (all available from the repos):
docbook contains the DocBook SGML DTD
docbook-xml contains the DocBook XML DTD
docbook-dssl contains .dsl stylesheets for docbook SGML and XML. For XML it is recommended to use the docbook-xsl package, which is more actively maintained and contains .xsl stylesheets.
docbook-xsl modular XSL stylesheets for processing documents composed with the DocBook XML DTD and its derivatives. The stylesheets provide XSLT transformations for HTML, XHTML, htmlhelp, javahelp, nroff, and Formatting Object output. These are the Norman Walsh.
docbook-utils contains utilities for converting docbook files to other formats (docbook2html, docbook2pdf scripts...)I think that's all I can think at the moment.

Cheers.

jfdill_2
April 7th, 2006, 09:53 PM
Last week I found this other WYSIWYG DocBook editor called xxe Standard Edition (or XMLMind XML Editor, at http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/)
Wow, thanks for that reference, that gave me a great idea: I put it on a USB key along with my XML project, now I can work on it on almost any computer! I may try some of the other Java editors that way.