DocBook Editors

I have been playing with a few editors/authoring tools to help make creating DocBook documents easier because although I am a hand coder at heart if I can save myself heart ache then I will.

The editors/authoring tools

OpenOffice

The open source office suite's word processor (Writer) can be configured to important and export in the DocBook format. I have given more details of DocBook And OpenOffice elsewhere but overall I have been dissastisifed with it. While I am not a big fan of WYSIWYG editors if it well then it might have a fan. Unfortunately either I've messed up with the (rather convoluted) proces of setting it up to support DocBook or it is very much early days for OpenOffice - it completely choked on importing and when it exported it just shovelled out proprietary tags and no DocBook formatting. Other people might have more luck and things will improve in the future but for now, while it is an interesting concept and could ultimately prove very useful indeed, I'm going to be putting this on the back burner.

epcEdit

epcEdit is a powerful XML/SGML editor with built in support for DocBook. It might not be free but if you are creating a lot of DocBook files from scratch then this is ideal - its powerful system of tags (reminiscent of HoTMetaL Pro's tags on view) and the ability to switch to the text, along with easy tag splitting and tag adding tools, mean you are making your first DocBook instantly. The tag splitting also makes it easy to add existing text but it could get a bit laborious with larger lumps of text. It is handy to keep the DocBook Element Reference to hand so you can quickly check which is the ideal tag to use (at least in the early stages).

XMLSpy

I have a free copy from a magazine cover disc and will be giving this a spin later.

Conclusion

epcEdit is ideal for this job (at least from my perspective as a code oriented chap) but converting long documents is still a bit tricky and I will be thinking about adapting the parsing code, used in various scripts here, to output DocBook markup as well as HTML and it would fit nicely with my idea for Liber a library type script.

Links:

DocBookAuthoringTools

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