KDE 4 Development book

[Frans Englich]

On Friday 12 November 2004 22:58, Eric Laffoon wrote:
> On Friday 12 November 2004 08:35 am, Andras Mantia wrote:
> > On Friday 12 November 2004 18:05, Frans Englich wrote:
> > > Back to editors; right, there is a general lack of open source XML
> > > editors(but many good, cross-platform, proprietary ones), I have some
> > > vague memory of Quanta though. I guess the solution is to simply
> > > write open source ones..
> >
> > Once I make Quanta work with entities it should be quite OK for editing
> > complex docbook. You can already do it, but it doesn't help with
> > entities. But it can be set up to validate the document structure as
> > you type and run other validators from inside.
> >
> > Andras
>
> It can also contain a complete set of templates, markup abreviations and
> scripted automation. Carlos Woelz has also created DocBook toolbars. In
> addition to this Paulo Moura Guedes is now involved full time in VPL
> development with one of the tasks on his do list to enable an XSL
> translation layer. This would in theory enable visual editing of DocBook
> files with an HTML representation. Quanta projects can also include
> internal documentation and other resources too.

I thought about GUI editing by reverse mapping an XSL transform, but I quickly 
discarded it as a horror to implement.. :) Another way of doing GUI Docbook 
editing is to use the Docbook CSS; Docbook XML directly rendered via CSS. The 
result is very nice and can be used in production, as long as it's simple(no 
index, footnotes, etc, articles typically works fine).

http://www.badgers-in-foil.co.uk/projects/docbook-css/

However, when editing Docbook, the simpleness is probably enough, the user 
have a file with chapter, section or similar as document root, and what's of 
interest is basic rendering. CSS is also a lot more lighter and the DOM of 
the rendering would be identical to the source doc.

I have no idea, I'm just throwing the idea out.

>
> One of my objectives for years has been making the visual creation of KDE
> documentation an easy task so that more people will enjoy it and
> contribute. We would be very interested in assisting in resource
> development for using Quanta in such an effort.

Sounds interesting, definitely something we should keep in our back heads and 
coordinate when possible.


		Frans