On Monday 26 February 2001 03:32, Jethro Cramp wrote:
On Monday, February 26th Steven T. Hatton wrote:
If you already know what I'm about to say, please foregive me my assumption that you are at the stage I was in my second week of researching this subject.
No need to be so polite <smile>.
Jethro, I am a bit to tired to think hard about this, but I do have a few thoughts on this.
a) Store the document data separate from the presentation (so that it could be parsed using python for other processes) but not in a relational database. b) Take the document data and display it in a number of formats (HTML, PDF). Have you looked at http://xml.apache.org or http://www.enhydra.org ?
Mark up languages and the display mechanisms (DSSSL, FOSI, CSS and XSL) should solve this problem. However these technologies come with their own set of problems:
1) Complexity. 2) Standards and tools are not yet very mature. There are some nice tools at http://www.extensibility.com/ I found the XML Instance and XML Authority to be usefull. Cannon may also be of interest to you.
What of course we are all looking for is a tool that is going to hide all the complexity from us and produce perfectly formatted documents in the right format at the right time.
Dude, that's called a secratery! Oh well, I guess I should start picking out a grave stone after that statement?
There are as you pointed out 2 parts to this process, the creation of the document and the viewing of it. As you also pointed out the options on Linux are very limited. I haven't used XMetal on Windows but I would guess that it is able to do the round trip: take a XML specification, write a document, apply a formatting document to it and then view the output.
IIRC you can read in the DTD get the picklist one would expect, and get a fairly WYSIWYG interface. That is, after you create the DocBook or other CSS. I believe it will produce the html as well. It was not capable of directly converting to well formatted hardcopy. I'm not sure of the state of this product or what it may truly be capable of: http://activestate.com/Products/Komodo/index.html I looked at it months ago on NT and it was very crash happy. I see they now have a Linux alpha. It looked very promising. It's founded on Mozilla a fact which I really like.
In document creation people are used to the WYSIWYG approach of modern wordprocessors. It's very hard and not necessarily desireable to implement markup documents in a WYSIWYG format. However if you can't see what your document looks like when you're creating it how do you know if you are achieving the affect you want? That comes down to how well designed the formatting template is and how well integrated it is to the markup template. This is fine for big projects and books but the time required to create and debug a markup template and its' formatting template for small projects make the process inconvenient.
This is very true. I have resolved myself to the fact that I simply have to toughen up and deal with the awkwardness of editing in markup a bit, run it through the renderer and then view it. It really isn't *that* bad. The effort I put into avoiding doing this was not worth the return. One tool, http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/index.html seemed to hold a lot of promise. It had a rudamentary DockBook XSL style sheet which was as impressive as it was incomplete.
On the Conglomerate site they have a couple of articles that are worth reading:
http://www.conglomerate.org/docs/death_of_wysiwyg.html http://www.conglomerate.org/intro.html
I'll have to look at this when I wake up. If I'm alive.
The first is their view on WYSIWYG documents versus marked up documents. The second is an intro to what they are trying to do about the problem
At the moment I think that the best strategy on Linux at the moment is:
1. Find an editor which accepts an XML template (Docbook template) and has a convenient 'pick-list' for tags and validates your document as you write it. As you pointed out this is not ideal, but it is a step up from coding by hand. Also you have to be familiar with the Docbook spec.
(X)Emacs can do this, but I found it quite challenging to learn. The Extensibility products can also support this. In particular the XML Instance supports XML validation. But it is not the greatest UI. All of these products seem to originate, to some, extent from these guys: http://cseng.aw.com/book/0,3828,0201485435,00.html I got a good laugh out of the fact that the correct output of their first example was nothing. I do believe there was intended humor in that.
2. To view the document in your chosen format use sgml-tools Lite which is a set of utilities, coded in python, for taking a docbook document and outputting to HTML (2 styles), JadeTeX, DVI, RTF, PS, PDF, plain text, and PalmOS iSilo formats. (The homepage is: http://sgmltools-lite.sourceforge.net)
Something tells me there is some kind of interference between sgmltools-lit and something in the SuSE distribution. I can't think of it right now. I seem to remember installing sgmltools-lite and regretting it.
I can't think of any superior way of writing documents at the moment. A Docbook / XML plug-in for KWord would be a cool project. I guess it is something that will probably get done in the future.
All the documentation in the KDE2.x, AFAIK, is DocBook based. Their sites may be well worth exploring if you haven't already. LyX does support the DocBook/LinuxDoc subset.
My requirements are slightly easier - I'm (trying) to build an application using ZOPE and the users (my clients) fill in some forms (inquiries and orders) and then my program automatically creates documents using a markup language and then depending on where the client needs to see the information (either on the web in HTML or by e-mail in which case a pdf file) the correct output is presented to them.
Thanks for your mail.
Jethro
Well I've probably given you many more distractions than you really needed. I found myself continually find a product that seemed to be great and then hitting a limitation I was not expecting. For example, the last I checked, psgml in (X)Emacs did not support XML name spaces. Please forgive any misspelling. My KDE2.1 current build is not supporting spell checking tonight, and my brain never has. Steve