Re: docbook IDE

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 11:23:45PM -0500 or thereabouts, battery841@mypad.com wrote:

Kevin, can you get line breaks into your editor? Each of your indented
sentences came out as one very long line...

> 	I got thinking tonight about docbook and the uses of it.  I was 
> wondering "How can I make it easier and faster to create manuals for 
> our favorite applications?"  That led me to the idea of a Docbook IDE.
> 	For those of you who don't know, an IDE is basically a program 
> dedicated to programming.  It integrates the writing process, utilities,
> compilers, and debuggers into one application and interface.  Here is 
> one way I thought we could do it.  We have tabs at the top, such as 
> copyright, introduction, etc.  Then we could type in the code in each 
> of the tabs.  We then add information, in docbook format, to the 
> respective tab.  Then there is a master tab which has the entire 
> document put together (basically each tab assembled with the other 
> tabs).  That is just one way to do it.
> 	Anyways, what do people think of maybe getting us an IDE of 
> some sort?  I think it would be kinda fun, but what does everyone think?

For my part, I already have a collection of "sets of tags I use
together a lot" templates, like the likely contents of <artheader> or 
some ready-marked up lists and so on, in files in a Templates directory, 
and I cut and paste from those sometime to cut down on some grunt work.
This is as much as I personally need. I don't mind the collection of
little commands to do things, now I know what they are. It's just so...
well, UNIXy, which makes me happy :) 

For an IDE, I suspect Emacs (which has editing, validating, shellout
to run jade (and I bet you can do that with a macro!), HTML viewer for
results-checking, spell-checker, etc etc) is probably half-way there :)

For a graphical one: unless someone wants to resurrect Conglomerate
and finish it (http://www.conglomerate.org) then I suspect it would
either be a huge huge task or just a front-end to all the commands
people already use, plus some templates. I'm not really sure what
advantage that would bring, When you get into graphical tools, you
also get into the discussions about whether they help or hinder 
when it comes to mark-up.

Telsa