Steve Sarette wrote: > 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.
Sorry but the answer is no. > 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. This is not a bug but rather a serious limitation. In practice, this limitation is so serious that we'll try to remove it in next release. > 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. Once again this is a limitation and not a bug. But in this case, we find this limitation to be a minor annoyance. > 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. Our engineering team clearly doesn't believe in shared *text* references, nor in character references, nor in the necessity of creating beautifully indented XML. But even if we are not convinced by this way of creating/editing structured content, our customers and Standard Edition users have complained too loudly and for a too long time. Therefore, we'll do a major effort in these areas: * Character references. * *pure text* references (i.e. not a mix of text and element). * beautifully indented XML. After that, you'll no longer need to use vi and Alexander Dupuy will no longer need to use unxxe.pl.
