RE: Re[2]: DOCBOOK: General roadmap questions

[Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.COM>]

> From: Pam Mandel <pmandel@nimble.com>
> 
> We HATED XMetal, here, HATED it. 

Whew, strong words, which don't fit my experience at all.
I'm using XMetal 1.2 every day now, and I like it.  I find
it to be a very productive XML authoring tool with the
Docbook XML DTD (and the customized version we use as well).
Perhaps the first version of XMetal was harder to
use. XMetal does require spending some time setting it up properly
with the styles and customizations.  SoftQuad should put
together a nice Docbook support package with customization
and style files.  You can get a stylesheet from the
user forum on the XMetal website now, though.

I've used Arbortext as well.  Arbortext is, of course, an
excellent product. But it is far more expensive, especially
if you include the expensive maintenance fees, which you
must if you want any upgrades (you can't skip maintenance
for a year, start maintenance again, and then try to
upgrade to a later version. You have to make up the skipped
maintenance fees).  The maintenance fee just for Document
Architect was $840 per year, and all that did was let us
recompile our DTD and FOSIs.  We didn't feel Arbortext gave us
sufficient extra value over XMetal to justify such fees.
Your mileage may vary.

I also ran into two cases where Arbortext was not handling
XML properly because it had an SGML parser at its core.
One case was the mishandling of Unicode numerical character
entities, and the other was trying to use an ID attribute
that starts with an underscore (permitted in XML, but not
accepted by Arbortext).  Perhaps these problems have been
fixed now, but XMetal wasn't bothered by them.

bobs
Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.              fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@sco.com