Gary Schnabl wrote:
Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Gary Schnabl wrote,
So, what is possible using OOo (and/or the SDK) along these two lines:
(1) structured authoring and (2) XML-structured template programming
for producing templates for those users in part (1)?
Having a writer for XML would help fill a wide hole in OOo
documentation.
Gary,
You might have more luck getting an answer from one of the OOo
lists... though I don't know which one would be best. Someone at Docs
might be able to point you in the right direction, if no one there knows.
I certainly agree that this is something that needs to be written
about, including at the advanced user level (not just the techie
level), given the potential for OOo to replace FM and other tools used
by the technical publishing industry. I frequently receive questions
from techwriters on topics like this, but I have no answers -- I
barely understand the questions!
Web searching and checking various OOo projects came up with little
concerning current OOo and XML structured authoring with OpenOffice.
Much of what I did locate dealt with OOo version 1, and most were some
one to three years since last revised.
OTOH, FrameMaker was fairly well along, even a half dozen years ago,
with XML/FM authoring/template design. One such FM doc (XML structured
template design) back then was nearly 600 pages long, and there were a
number of shorter docs/tutorials. Adobe even had updated my ancient FM
7.0 to the DocBook 4.5 release last fall. OOo 2.3 is still at DocBook
4.1.2.
I'll keep looking and will try out some of those version 1 docs and see
how adequate they are or not. Some of those authors were pessimistic
about OOo and XML.
We (Sun docs team) are using OOo for writing the application help
files which are in a simple XML format. Unfortunately, we also
are stuck with version 1.x because we didn't have time to port
the filters and macros to ODF yet.
I don't know where the pessimism about OOo and XML comes from. I agree
that XML editing is not a focus area for OOo, but OOo has all the
ingredients it requires to use it for XML editing: a native XML format,
an XSLT filter framework, and a template/style mechanism.
But you must be aware that, I guess pretty much like FM, OOo is not
a native XML editor and you need to take some detours on your way.
The main challenge is to make OOo deal with elements that it doesn't
know. You can use styles for that.
I wanted to write an article about using OOo for XML editing
and describe the experience I made when setting this up for
application help authoring for a long time, I never got to it.
Is there any demand?
Frank
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Frank Peters
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