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