{"id":53,"date":"2003-12-04T10:12:25","date_gmt":"2003-12-04T14:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/2003\/12\/04\/editing-docbook\/"},"modified":"2003-12-04T10:12:25","modified_gmt":"2003-12-04T14:12:25","slug":"editing-docbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/2003\/12\/04\/editing-docbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing Docbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a88'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\nWe&#8217;re putting together a services provided document for the operational and IT staff here at the Berkman Center.  I&#8217;ve always kind of wanted a reason to use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.docbook.org\/\">docbook<\/a>, and this seems like an excellent excuse to do so.  I often find with these sorts of projects that the task of just figuring how to format and organize such a document is the hurdle that stops from me ever getting around to putting it together.  Docbook provides a simple (as long as you ignore most of the elements!), straightforward way to organize any informational document, removing that barrier.  Moreover, the structure is built into the document, so it&#8217;s easier for multiple people to work on the same document &#8212; everyone has to use the same organizational structure because it is dictated by the language.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe difficult part of figuring out to make this work was finding a good gui editor that hides most of complexity from the other, non-techy folks who will be working on the document.  I&#8217;ve settled on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xmlmind.com\/xmleditor\/\">XMLMind<\/a>.  I played around with a bunch of options, including Word, OpenOffice, and a bunch of xml editors.  Docbook support in Word and OpenOffice is not a good enough fit &#8212; I could make it work, but it wasn&#8217;t really any easier to learn than writing the xml manually, so they wouldn&#8217;t help my non-techy compatriots.  Most of the XML editors I tried were functional but hopelessly technical.  They all seem intended to make it easier for folks who know XML to create documents, but I want something that will allow non-techy people to edit documents with only a very basic understanding of XML.  XMLMind is the only (free beer) editor that was easier enough for non-techies to navigate that I feel comfortable using it for the project.  It allows WYSI(almost)WYG editing of the docbook document, handles the conversion to html and pdf automagically (though the free version doesn&#8217;t support PDF creation), and has few enough UI glitches to be usable.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOf course, I haven&#8217;t turned it lose on my non-techy compatriots yet.  I&#8217;ll followup once I have and have gotten their responses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re putting together a services provided document for the operational and IT staff here at the Berkman Center. I&#8217;ve always kind of wanted a reason to use docbook, and this seems like an excellent excuse to do so. I often find with these sorts of projects that the task of just figuring how to format [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-support"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/geekroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}