Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: best tool for docbook?

[Bob McIlvride <robert at cogent dot ca>]

> Well, Holger, it may be just that some of us find emacs a clumsy,
> cumbersome editor. 

My two cents worth:  I came to my current job from a Mac/Windows desktop
publishing, 100% WYSIWYG background, and even wrote articles on the
advantages of the author having full control of the layout of the page. 
I had no Emacs, Linux, or programming experience.  

At first I felt crippled, like I couldn't move.  Using Emacs in
X-windows, I could still use the mouse and at least do something.  But I
soon discovered the power of the control keys, and Emacs psgml mode. 
It's really fast.  By writing a few simple macros you can mark up huge
regularly formatted tables or dozens of pages of reference entries in an
hour or two.

At the same time, using Emacs helped me change my mind set from semantic
markup to structural markup.  Could it be that some people who demand a
WYSIWYG editor for DocBook are those who haven't yet internalized this
paradigm?

Of course I frequently process my work into HTML and PDF to view it and
proofread it.  And it would be nice to be able to make text edits from
one of those views.  But for fast editing of both text and markup, I
think Emacs is a very good editor for DocBook documents.

Cheerio!

Bob

---------------------------------------
Robert McIlvride (robert@cogent.ca)
Cogent Real-Time Systems (www.cogent.ca)

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