Thanks for the reply. I took the plunge after sending out that email
and I've found everything you say to be true, especially the part about
the GUI being tedious.
Are there any plans to better support these sorts of activities?
Variables for product names is a common activity for me because
Marketing can never make up their minds. I also want to use this
technique for common language that appears multiple times in the docs,
such as definition of terms and frequently used parameter descriptions.
I also discovered that copying the XInclude and then pasting it into a
different location in the document causes XmlMind to paste just the
text that the XInclude resolves to -- and not the XInclude itself. This
is unfortunate because if that copy/paste operation would work then I
could avoid a lot of time in the menus. Also, if I copy a block of text
that has an XInclude and then paste it elsewhere in the document, the
XInclude is lost. This is a bug, IMO.
Also, XmlMind isn't very good at updating an XInclude reference if you
change the text in the original document. In order to see the update in
referencing documents, as far as I can tell you have to close and then
open them again. This is irritating.
For the moment I'm just putting special character strings into my
documents as I write and then once I get done with any given file, I
close it and then replace those character strings with the appropriate
XInclude statement using vi.
You guys have an otherwise pretty good product, and this is the only
major area where I find that it falls down. I hope you can forward this
email on to your engineering team for consideration, or file some
feature requests or something.
Why is it that your engineering team doesn't believe in shared text
references anyway? I was quite surprised to find you eliminating them
on document open.
- Steve
On Dec 17, 2003, at 3:20 AM, Hussein Shafie wrote:
> Steve Sarette wrote:
>> Hello.
>> I'm thinking about purchasing XML Mind profession edition, but before
>> I do I want to make sure about something. I have an absolute
>> requirement to be able to "variablize" product names. Normally I
>> would just use shared text entities for this (e.g. <!ENTITY myprod
>> "My New Product Name> but XmlMind replaces these on import.
>> So I'm wondering if I can achieve the same effect using XInclude.
>> What I would want to do is have a file with all my variables in it,
>> and identify each with an id tag. For example:
>> <para><phrase id="myprod">My New Product Name</phrase><phrase
>> id="otherprod">My Other Product Name</phrase>
>> and then use XInclude to include the appropriate phrase where
>> necessary in the text body. By reading the product doc and by playing
>> around with the free version of XMLMind, it certainly seems like this
>> should work. However, I'm reluctant to gamble a few hundred dollars
>> only to find out that it doesn't.
>> Also, I need to know if this sort of thing will work with the PDF and
>> RTF conversion plug-ins that are available for XmlMind.
>
> I tested this with:
>
> ---
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
> <!DOCTYPE para PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
> "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd";>
> <para>
> <phrase id="myprod">My New Product Name</phrase>
> <phrase id="otherprod">My Other Product Name</phrase>
> </para>
> ---
>
> Note that you need to add a DTD to make XXE recognize id as being an
> ID attribute.
>
> Everything works fine with the Professional Edition, including
> conversion to RTF and PDF.
>
> I created this:
>
> ---
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
> <!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
> "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd";>
> <article>
> <title>Test</title>
>
> <sect1>
> <title>Test</title>
>
> <para>First product <xi:include
> href="phrases.xml#myprod"
> xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
> ></xi:include
> >.</para>
>
> <para>Second product <xi:include
> href="phrases.xml#otherprod"
> xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
> ></xi:include
> >.</para>
> </sect1>
> </article>
> ---
>
> I just have to warn you that the GUI is a bit tedious to use when you
> repeatedly insert references to different elements found inside the
> same external document. (For example, there is no keyboard shortcut to
> insert a reference to an external document or element.)
>
