DOCBOOK-APPS: Revision control for DocBook SGML/XML documents

[Mike Broschinsky <mbroschi@das.state.ut.us>]

Hi all,

Please bear with a newbie for a moment. While this post may be *somewhat* off-topic, I am sending it because I suspect there a some on the list who edit in the same (or substantially the same) environment as I do.

I'm drafting some help documentation using the DocBook XML DTD, Emacs and PSGML (as packaged with Paul Kinnucan's XAE), on a Windows NT machine. I would like to track revisions in my DocBook documents, and, in an effort to stick with open and free software, thought I might use GNU RCS.

When running ediff in Emacs against two different versions of a test text document, I note that ediff shows differences on the line level. Does this mean that I need to maintain my document in a one sentence per line format to use RCS and ediff? Does this present any problems when processing XML files, for I seem to recall reading somewhere that white space in XML documents is significant?

Is there a way to show only the words that have changed, as opposed to showing lines with changes?

Other suggestions on how best to track revisions, if RCS is not the way to go, would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike