Re: How do people do this?

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> I am wondering how people approach writing their GNOME documents (and
> anything else they do involving Docbook style markup). This is more idle
> curiosity than anything else.
> 
> Currently, I am finding it most convenient to write my documents once in
> plain text and then, after correcting that draft, mark it up and then do
> another editing pass to correct any stylistic problems that result from
> the markup. Of course, the editing passes are usually multiple passes
> and even after publishing things I will notice places that need
> correction.
> 
> I have also tried doing the markup as I go along the first time (which I
> tend to do for short documents anyway), since I have a fairly hefty set
> of vim macros setup to make adding tags flow fairly naturally into my
> typing. This way feels a bit awkward, though (the macros aren't entirely
> natural constructs, since otherwise they would be triggered by normal
> typing of English), and I find that I often lose the thread of what I am
> trying to say whilst adding the tag soup.
> 
> However, the current technique is not perfect, either. The main problem
> I find is that I tend to write with a mental image of what bits will end
> up at what presntational level (sect1, sect2, tip, callout, etc) and
> sometimes that information gets lost between the plain text version and
> the markup phase.
> 

<plug type="shameless">The developer version OOo coming out any day 
now will have support for editing docbook documents. While it won't 
at least initially support all tags it supports a reasonable subset 
(see http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/) so you can edit at
least the inital document draft as a normal word processor document</plug>

> Malcolm

	Sander

	This is the place where all
	the junkies go	
	where time gets fast
	but everything gets slow