Re: Authoring Tools WAS: Switching to XML

Josh,

> Anything that you produce from a WYSWYG editor is going to have to be
> massaged to work with PostgreSQL.Org docs.

*sigh* too bad Lyx only writes DocBook and doesn't read it.

> > * = an authoring tool is one which makes generation of the document
> > easier/faster than hand-editing text files. No such tool exists for
> > SGML -- even the Emacs toolkit merely does validation.
>
> What is it specifically you are looking for then? Because that is what
> Docbook is, XML (or sgml) the only thing you need to do is validate.

"Authoring Tool" means "not always hand-editing tags". Right now, I can't
do anything with Emacs SGML that I couldn't do with Wordpad or Pico,
except validate.

Let me give you an example of a doc change which needing to hand-edit SGML
prevented me from making: I wanted to clean up runtime.sgml by adding an
alpha index, and clearly breaking out data like defaults, set time, etc.
This meant changing 70% of the document, including some significant
re-arranging.

After 5 hours of editing, I discovered that I was only 1/3 done ... and
that there had been incompatible changes in CVS in the meantime. I gave
up.

If the docs were WYSWYG-editable or if we had any authoring tool which
would automatically fix tags, I would have been able to make the changes
and submit a patch in < 4 hours, not 15 hours+ it would have taken to
complete the project.

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco