[osis-core] Re: Open source XML editor....

[Kirk Lowery]

Patrick,

I've been following up on my original suggestion. 
<http://xml.openoffice.org/> has all the information one needs to write 
an import/export filter, with examples for conversion from the OOo 
Writer to HTML. That model can certainly be followed, and all the user 
sees are style sheets and an import/export menu item. Recompiling a 
special version of Writer does not seem to be necessary. As proof of 
concept, there are a number of developers at the Linux Documentation 
Project who are adding DocBook functionality to OpenOffice.org and from 
the developer's list I can see that they are about 75% of the way there. 
If they can do it with that complex DTD, OSIS can also do it.

The only thing I haven't quite figured out is how one enforces the OSIS 
(or any) content model (not allowing the user to insert illegal 
elements, etc.) inside Writer.

I strongly urge OSIS to consider OpenOffice.org instead of creating its 
own authoring tool, because then one has the enormous functionality of a 
full-featured wordprocessor. In addition, if an organization or 
individual already knows and uses the OpenOffice suite, then the 
learning curve is about zero for the user.

[OpenOffice.org office suite uses XML as its native file format, and 
includes hooks for alien DTDs, and is Open Source to boot.]

My $0.02

Kirk

P.S. My suggestion is responding to the request of the Rome conferees 
for a WYSIWYG OSIS authoring tool. If one is doing XML development, that 
another matter....

Patrick Durusau wrote:
> Steve,
> 
> Have you looked at a recent version of OpenOffice? (I haven't and hence 
> the question.) Might be interesting to use its native XML to export to 
> OSIS. Kirk suggested that there is documentation on how to write an 
> export filter for other formats. (Would be the office alternative to 
> jEdit, which I have seen before but not played with very much.)
> 
> Patrick
> 
> Steven DeRose wrote:
> 
>> Have now played with jEdit a little; it's impressively fast for being 
>> in Java, and very full-featured. Syntax hightlighting for XML works, 
>> but is a little simplistic. Apparently driven by a config file (itself 
>> in XML), so could probably hack it pretty nicely for OSIS-specific 
>> coloring.
>>
>> Main problem is that it doesn't do any real formatting. But I'll bet 
>> there's a bit more one can do, such as auto-indenting constructs; and 
>> it might not take a whole lot of work to let a syntax-coloring 
>> definition specify not just color, but also font, size, and indent -- 
>> which would probably suffice for general editing. Will read up and see 
>> if there's much more one can do just at the config level, or if such 
>> tweaks would reqire mucking around in the core. The app in only 136K, 
>> so there can't be that much code there.
>>
>> It does claim to support Unicode, plus many other encodings including 
>> shift-JIS (popular Japanese encoding); and has a macro language and a 
>> plugin API. And it does proportional fonts fine, so at least it's 
>> clearly not based on a row/column model of the screen. And, it has a 
>> synchronized scrolling features for multiple panes, which i'll bet we 
>> could hack to do the right thing (currently I think it just goes by 
>> line numbers).
>>
>> It's a nice looking tool....
>>
>> At 03:05 PM -0400 05/07/02, Steven DeRose wrote:
>>
>>> Has anybody played with jEdit? Entire editor in Java/Swing. 
>>> Apparently has plug-ins to support something like 70 syntaxes, 
>>> including XML. See review at 
>>> http://www.linuxmuse.com/articles.php?action=section&article=14&num=1
>>> Main page for it at http://www.jedit.org/    Feature listing at 
>>> http://www.jedit.org/index.php?page=features
>>>
>>> I wonder what it would take to build a custom mode for OSIS 
>>> (basically hack the XML mode so it also knows about milestones, and 
>>> so it provides all the right menus for tagging easily.
>>>
>>> If we had that, plus a plug-in that could do verse-checking, and one 
>>> to pull up multiple texts in parallel windows, we'd have a pretty 
>>> good deal.
>>>
>>> Not sure what level of formatting it does other than indentation -- 
>>> but as long as it can do arbitrary fonts and a few things like color, 
>>> italics, and bold, it would probably be a pretty good place to start.
>>>
>>> Thoughts? Anybody want to take a shot at making it work for us
>>>
>>> S
>>> -- 
>>>
>>> Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
>>> Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
>>> Email: sderose@speakeasy.net
>>> Backup email: sderose@mac.com, sjd@stg.brown.edu
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 


-- 
Kirk E. Lowery, Ph.D.
Director, Westminster Hebrew Institute
Adjunct Professor of Old Testament
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia