KDE 4 Development book

[Eric Laffoon]

On Saturday 13 November 2004 04:33 am, Frans Englich wrote:
> 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).

Yes, the XSL transform approach is nightmarish, but then creating a good 
visual editor isn't exactly a walk in the park. For us the XSL layer would be 
one more where there are already several layers being managed. The CSS 
approach would have less flexibility in rendering in several areas, but it 
could be workable. I haven't tried it but it should be possible to do it in 
Quanta now provided KHTML supports XML/CSS. I know it did not earlier. Does 
it now?
>
> 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.

True, but we already manage beyond DOM because we match up document nodes that 
have preprocessing (PHP) so we have the raw document, the DOM and the 
rendered document.
>
> I have no idea, I'm just throwing the idea out.

I should know the KHTML status but I have too many million things to track. If 
it's possible we should play with it and see how it works. 
>
> > 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
I'm certainly interested in however we can coordinate.
-- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://quanta.sourceforge.net  sequitur at kde.org
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