Hussein, Thanks very much for your thorough reply! We are still evaluating both our editing options and our overall approach to enforcing semantics. I realize that you do support rendering semantic tags via CSS. Do you know of any techniques for minimizing overhead in maintaining both this CSS and XSL transforming semantic tags to DocBook tags? I am wondering whether the CSS and XSL transforms might be generated (CSS) or configured (XSL) based on common settings. Thanks very much, Carl
-----Original Message----- From: Hussein Shafie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 1:18 AM To: Carl Castro Cc: xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com Subject: Re: [XXE] Questions about Customizing XMLEditor Carl Castro wrote: > We're evaluating tools including editors to use for a DocBook-based > documentation system we've developed in-house. > We have our own semantic-level XML DTDs and XMLSchemas for various specific > types of document (including guides, "cookbooks" and references). We have > XSLT to transform these into DocBook representations, and then (mostly > standard) XSL-FO to transform the DocBook representations into PDFs, etc. > We would like to be able to "plug-in" our XSL transforms to DocBook, edit in > our own tags, and see the DocBook output in the editor as "WYSIWYG". We'd > also like to be able to update the XSL transforms in the same editing > session, without reconfiguring or restarting, and see updated WYSIWYG > output. > Would this be possible in the Standard or Professional Edition of XMLEditor? > How would it be done? This is possible in both editions if you use DTDs, and only with Professional Edition if you use XMLSchemas. It would work like this: * You open one of your documents in XXE. You edit it with your own tags. You need to write an XXE configuration, preferably with a CSS style sheet to do that, let's call it cookbook.xxe. http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/docs/configure/ch02.html * In cookbook.xxe, you add a macro-command containing a process command and ending with native command: XXE.open. Let's call this macro-command previewDocBook. http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/docs/commands/ch02.html * The process command uses your XSLT style sheet to transform the document being edited into a temporary DocBook file. http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/docs/commands/ch05.html * The last step of the macro-command: XXE.open, is used to open the temporary DocBook file in a separate ``window'' (inside XXE). http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/docs/commands/ch06s66.html * The user will have to refresh the DocBook preview manually by invoking macro-command previewDocBook (you can bind previewDocBook to a key stroke). * By default, XSLT style sheets are not cached. This means that you can update XSL transforms transparently for the user. (However, if your XSLT style sheet is not modular and is not stored on a remote HTTP or FTP server, you can try caching it because this will speed up previewDocBook.)
