DocBook XML export

Alexandre Enkerli aenkerli at indiana.edu
Tue Jan 13 20:58:09 PST 2004


> I'd like to hear some opinions about how DocBook exports might work 
> from inside of Outliner.
*Really* glad you're thinking about this.

> Just having a structured document isn't enough, you need all those 
> special DocBook tags in there too.
Well, columns work really well for attributes. Couldn't they work for 
elements too?
Otherwise, it could be something similar to the Notes pane only more 
structured. Each row is included in an element and we don't necessarily 
need to see this element all the time, so a hideable pane would be nice.
There's also the model used by most XML editors (just came across 
jaxe.sf.net yesterday and it seems quite interesting). Have the tags 
actually surround the content. In OO, they could be similar to comments 
in Radio (and other Winer apps).

> My first thought was to have a pop-up for each row
Ugh...

> highly unlikely we'll be able to stop a user from creating horribly 
> invalid DocBook files
Too bad. We all (not just Mac users) need a good validating editor for 
XML documents and the outliner model works well. Especially if not 
everything is considered an outline row.

>  so we're just shooting for a faster-than-editing-xml-source approach 
> to producing the XML.
Fair enough. In that case, why not shoot for producing good partial 
DocBook support instead of so-so complete support? Meaning, exporting a 
structured document to DocBook code (not necessarily a complete DocBook 
document) while preserving most features (fonts, styles, paragraphs, 
etc.) could work really well as a first step to DocBookification. After 
all, OO's output will need to be edited anyway...

> Thoughts?
Yes, a lot of them. OO-as-DocBook-editor was a large part of the 
(silly) "OmniDocument" fantasy I posted last summer. But more 
practically, the OO as DocBook helper could work well.




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