On Jan 29, 2008, at 1:45 PM, Warren Young wrote:
> 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/
I will definitely take a look at lyx.
>
> 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.
Go to Preferences->Editors->File Associations and add *.dbk. with the
same associated editors as *.xml.
I think there's one more Preferences setting to deal with, but I
don't remember what it is.
> That, coupled with Eclipse's tunnel vision regarding workspaces, I
> don't think I could recommend it as a general-purpose DocBook editor.
I don't use or understand workspaces or projects in Eclipse: I just
use it to edit individual files.
I recommend Eclipse 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.
>
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