Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: docbook visual editor

[Irene Vatton <Irene.Vatton@inrialpes.fr>]

> Hi Andrew,
> 
> [moving this discussion to docbook-apps]
> 
> On Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 05:39:23PM +0200, The DeerBear wrote:
> > With the occasion of this first message I introduce myself.
> > My name is Andrew and I am a programmer.
> > I've been asked to write a docbook visual editor( that may become
> > open-source ) 
> 
> We at Alcove are in the process to start working on the Thot editor (a
> generic editor for structured documents - part of the project is stall
> since '97), with the goal to add docbook support to it.  Thot is
> already Free-Software.  Maybe we can join our efforts to get it done
> faster and at a lower cost for everyone ?
> 
> Here is a little blurb I wrote to present it internally
> 
>   Thot is a graphical editor for structured documents, based on
>   motif/lesstif ans on a generic library (thotlib), both developped at
>   INRIA in Grenoble. The last release of Thot occured in october '97.
>   
>   Thotlib has continued to evolve within the W3C, as a base to the Amaya
>   browser/editor, where recently a port to Gtk was started (experimental
>   in Amaya 5.1).

Yes, the Amaya team is also developing now a general support of XML where
the document structure is generated at the same time the document instance
is parsed.
If you plan to develop a Docbook authoring tool I suggest you to proceed 
like we did in Amaya for HTML, SVG and MathML. We use generic functions of
the thotlib for handling the document tree + presentation + WYSIWYG editing
and we connect to the thotlib specific functions that control the semantic 
of the application. The thotlib allows you to do that easily.

>   
>   Thot has the potential to be the WYSIWYG editor for DocBook which
>   we miss for the consistency of our documents.
> 
> Refs:
>   http://www.inrialpes.fr/opera/pub/Thot/index.html
>   http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
> 
> You can get old precompiled binaries to test it, but it looks like
> there are problems on GNU/Linux systems with a recent libc+toolchain -
> there will probably be some debugging to do (I already have a couple
> of build patches, but they're largely unsufficient).
> 
> Linux bins: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/editors/X/thot/
> Others: http://www.inrialpes.fr/opera/pub/Thot/Doc/thoteditor/Download.html#Getting
> 
> 
> Other volunteers welcomed :)
> 
> We'll probably set that up as a project on the sourceforge-like
> freesoftware.gnu.org, as soon as we're sure it makes no problem for
> the W3C/Amaya people (in CC).
> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
> Free-Software Engineer				      Ingénieur Logiciel-Libre
> Free-Software time manager    	       Responsable du temps Informatique-Libre
>