Re: DOCBOOK: Is there a need for GUI XML/SGML DocBook tools?

[schen at falconwing dot com]

Hi Jeff,

On Sun, 31 Oct 1999, Jeff Duska wrote:

...
> Anyhow, it seems to me that we need a cross-platform open source tool that
> can do several things. 
...

Well, it seems we pop up everywhere =)  Spoke with you a bit on the Argo
mailing list regarding it's (yet to be finished) plug-in architecture.

You might be interested to know that I've already been working on such a
beast targetted for JDK 1.1/Swing, in conjunction with the plug-in stuff.
It can only do simple XML editing at the moment, but I have plans for the
following features:

* Integrated XML parsing (using xp)
* Nifty stuff like smart indenting, tree view, tag folding, tab
  completion of element & attribute names, etc. etc.
* Integrated XSL transformation
* Management of large document sets (sources -> various output formats)
  by manipulating diagram representation
* As a plug-in, has scripting language support for customization
* Bundled with support for DocBook/XML, TEI-Lite XML source, and PDF, HTML
  output

I haven't announced it yet, but I'm about to release a very preliminary
version for interested co-developers at www.falconwing.com/~schen.
E-mail me off list if you'd like to be notified about it.

I hope that eventually it'll be easy enough to use w.r.t. DocBook that
documentation projects will adopt it.

The current codename for the project is 'Athame'.

. . . Sean.