Subject: Re: Request on Cosource: Visual DocBook editor: XML
From: Larry Kollar (kollar@alltel.net)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 22:21:50 CDT
Paul Rohr wrote:
>... We've had a few requests for adding DocBook support to
>AbiWord, and put a little thought into how this could be done.
Shoot, I'd *love* to see it happen. But the whole structured
editing environment paradigm is diametrically opposed to your
"church secretary" goal. You want to see the nice church lady
give the Big Hairy Eyeball to a computer, have her try to do
a church bulletin in LyX. :-) (OTOH, LyX *can* export DocBook,
but uses the SGML flavor rather than XML.)
>Note that AbiWord is *not* a full-generality XML editor, and sufficiently
>complex tag nesting could not be handled by such a solution. Also, since
>the style system doesn't provide a lot of integrity constraints (just
>paragraph vs. section, and followedby), any DTD-like validation would
>probably get done either externally or at export time.
Here's what I think it would take, based on my experience
with FrameMaker+SGML. (You *don't* want to go there. Trust me.)
- Focus on that one DTD, or even a large subset. For
example, LyX only exports DocBook <article>, although
support for <book> is said to be forthcoming. Concen-
trate on the things that AbiWord can do already.
- Create an option in AbiWord to turn off ***ALL*** access
to character and paragraph formatting. The writers will
*have* to use styles and nothing else. Any non-styled
formatting should be summarily dropped on the floor.
- Forget importing for now. Don't even think about round-
trip'ing -- it's difficult to do right in FrameMaker+SGML,
and that beast is *designed* for it.
In the end, a semi-fork might not be a bad idea. Keep it all
in one code base, but a compile-time option ("make db" vs "make"
for example) determines whether one compiles AbiWord or
AbiWord+DB (can you tell I've been using FrameMaker for far too
long?). This would allow for a somewhat more restricted editing
environment for DocBook'ers while allowing the church secretary
free rein to experiment with new looks for the bulletin.
>Volunteers anyone? The existing styles code is quite simple, but if you
>need help figuring out how to extend it for these purposes, let me know.
Creating a template shouldn't be hard. Adding conditionals to
grey out the format menu (or selected items) should be likewise
fairly simple. I'm not much of a coder, but even I might be able
to do this much. If someone wants to beat me to it, I won't feel
cheated though. :-)
Larry
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