Re: Bounce a few ideas off

[Steve Dunham <dunham cps msu edu>]

"Kenneth R. Kinder" <Ken@KenAndTed.com> writes:


>  * DocBook IDDE (Integrated Document Development Environment) <grin>

> DocBook, being the new choice for LDP (Linux Documentation Project),
> Gnome, and probably more and more, the community as a whole, it a
> spectacular information markup language!  But again, this requires
> at least soooome reading.

> My idea is a sort of not really WYSIWYG (what you see is what you
> get would be impractical for such a structured systems), but "aided"
> environment.  I would see it as having a tree-like listbox at the
> right, with a textbox at the right.  The left would have your
> outline (Articles, Sections, Books, ect - it's how DocBook works!),
> and would edit your outline.  The right would have the document
> itself.  Selecting part of your outline would jump your text box to
> its location.

You can build a somewhat WYSIWYG system using the Thot toolkit. The
Thot toolkit is for building structured text editors and is used for
both the "thot" editor and the "amaya" wysiwyg HTML editor.  It works
quite well for editing structured text - I find it much easier to
control than Netscape's editor (after RTFM, the binding for the return
key is particularly important to understand).

Amaya (the html editor) also features a nice, editable outline view of
your document as you describe above.

If you want to look at amaya, you can grab an RPM package of version
1.2a from:

   http://www.cps.msu.edu/~dunham/redhat

(My Debian package is at the usual sites.) The Amaya home page is at:

   http://www.w3.org/Amaya

Thought can be found at:

   http://opera.inrialpes.fr/thot/

But I don't have it packaged yet.


Writing a Doc Book version of Thot would involve: 

* Translating the docbook DTD into a specification language that thot uses.
* Describing how to render the documents in another specification language.
* Writing code to import DOCBOOK into thot and export the internal
representation back to DOCBOOK.
* Adding desired features to the GUI.

There is documentation about this on the thot site, but there is a
learning curve.

> The program would also include menus to quickly generate all your
> "tags," and some templates for programs to work from.

If you just want menus for tags, you could use the PSGML mode for
(X)Emacs.  It parses DTDs, so it can be used for anything.


Steve
dunham@cps.msu.edu