Re: docbook IDE

[battery841 mypad com]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 08:45:30AM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> Kevin, can you get line breaks into your editor? Each of your indented
> sentences came out as one very long line...
Yes.  Kenny already yelled at me quite brutally (Hi Kenny :) about this.
I will fix :)  BTW, in vi, is there wordwrap?
> 
> > 	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 :) 
Hmmm...that is definatly an idea I'll need to try to create this weekend.
Thanks for the idea.
> 
> 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.
These are a few things I've thought of myself.  Most of the developers
don't appear to care ***too much*** about documentation, so why would
they spend there time working on something like this?  I myself use
vim for editing HTML and docbook and enjoy it.  But I agree, you're
getting really ethical if you go and start making GUI tools to make
any markup language.  I wasn't aware that conglomerate existed up
until now.  Anyways, if it is not a 'huge' task, then is it really
worth it?  I don't mean to burden the developers, but if we're
going to do this, I'd say do it right.
Kevin
-- 
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