Lou Iorio wrote:
>
> It also seems to me a bad idea to try to use a WYSIWYG editor for any
> markup language.
It's a bad idea to use general purpose tools for something restrictive
like DocBook, but it doesn't mean you can't make tools that do work
well. Take a look at LyX: http://www.lyx.org/
It works almost like a word processor, except that because it is a GUI
for LaTeX, it restricts you to only formatting that makes sense in
LaTeX. The problem with modern word processors is that they have the
ability to make completely free-form documents, which goes against the
DocBook Way. But when you write something like LyX, which has a strict
underlying data model, it changes the UI in ways so it can't work
exactly like a word processor.
I suspect it's a lot easier to write such a tool than a word processor
or HTML editor, because the restrictions in DocBook rule out entire
classes of formatting you don't have to worry about. The only reason
there are more word processors and HTML editors than DocBook editors is
due to the relative size of the markets for those tools.
> That's not to say there are not good editors for DocBook. I use Eclipse
> <http://www.eclipse.org/>; the current version has
> great support for DocBook.
I don't know that I'd call it "great". "Useful" at best. I was unable
to get it to cope with my ".dbx" files. Until I renamed them to use
.xml extensions, it didn't know what it do with them. That, coupled
with Eclipse's tunnel vision regarding workspaces, I don't think I could
recommend it as a general-purpose DocBook editor.
If you already have a project in Eclipse and the DocBook file is part of
that project, I'm sure it works fine.
