Zvezdan Petkovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2006-12-23 15:06 -0500: > I would classify myself as "skilled hands" too and I agree with your > assessment of *roff and TeX (I used both extensively). However, I did > write a 10 page technical document (34 with the appendices that simply > include the files) in DocBook-XML. I have turned away in disgust and > never looked back. > > I can be classified as "skilled hands" with both Vim and Emacs. > I've made my own Vim filetype plugin to insert DocBook keywords easier.
I personally think it's a pretty bad idea to attempt to do any extensive editing of DocBook (or most other forms of XML) in Vim. I know there are people who do it, but I guess their pain threshhold is a lot higher than mine. I say that as someone who uses Vim exclusively for all my text editing. Except for editing XML. (I do use Vim for doing touch-up changes to XML documents, but not for any serious editing). > Emacs (which I used to use for more than a decade) already has a DocBook > support. Yet, I did not see them as an effective toolchain for a > writer. I can't possibly imagine what could be an effective toolchain. If you've not completely sworn off Emacs, you might want to try nxml-mode for Emacs -- it's packaged for some distros and downloable from here: http://www.thaiopensource.com/nxml-mode/ It's the one thing I actually use Emacs for. The difference between using that and using Vim to edit an XML document is that nxml reads the actual DTD (actually, a RELAX NG schema) for whatever document instance you're editing. So it can give you context-sensitive completion for element and attribute names -- and always flags, in real time, any parts of your document that are not valid according to the schema you're using. > One still has to select for each of these words whether they are > command, filename, emphasis, acronym (over 100 possibilities in > DocBook). The selection must be done through some sort of menu > (remembering all 100+ possibilities couldn't be called comfortable I > guess). And that is slow, very slow. It's also distracting from the > writing. If I don't want to be distracted I could postpone the tagging > for later. I'm afraid that then, I could simply omit a tag where I > should have put it. There are many other people that have tried it and run into the same frustrations. Using a good editing application like nxml helps a lot, but even then, for a lot of people, authoring their source in DocBook is far from being their preferred means writing up documentation. Though I like it just fine myself. I'm not sure what could be done to make it easier. Any XML vocabulary that gives you way to mark up a wide range of content semantically rather than just presentationally is going to have the same degree of complexity -- roughly the same number of element and attribute names. I know there are some mechanisms that allow you to use plain text with simple Wiki-like markup, and generate DocBook output from that. But the level of semantic markup they provide is really limited. --Mike _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
