Re: [docbook] Re: XML Editors

[Joachim Ziegler <ziegler@mpi-sb.mpg.de>]

Steinar Bang wrote:
> 
> I use GNU Emacs/psgml, which works great for me, with DTD-aware
> element insertion and attribute editing, XML tree navigation and
> editing, folding, and validation.  But I wouldn't dream of even
> _proposing_ it to someone who today uses MSWord.


I'm also using Emacs+psgml. Most of the time it works great, but it has 
some annoying bugs:


a) using entities to break a document in smaller pieces as described in 
"The Definite Guide" does not work for me:

<!ENTITY chap1 SYSTEM "chap1.sgm">
<!ENTITY chap2 SYSTEM "chap2.sgm">
]>
<book><title>My First Book</title>
&chap1;
&chap2;
</book>


Emacs (and Xemacs neither) does not parse the DTD in the smaller files. 
(Yes, I have tried something like

<!--
     Local Variables:
     mode: xml
     sgml-parent-document: ("master-file.xml")
     End:
   -->
)

This mechanism only works for small documents (at least on my machine.) 
but not when the documents get large. i don't know how to fix this.



b) Editing of attributes does not work. It always turns
*all* attribute values to lowercase. Sometimes it inserts funny markup 
like an extra ">". (Unfotunately, this behaviour cannot be reproduced 
deterministically.)
This is very dangerous because it can make files unvalid (by lowercasing 
IDs or IDREfs.)


c) psgml sometimes becomes confused when I type something like

<para>The number which is half as big as n is n/2. </para>

It sometimes (but not always!) misinterprets the "/" division operator 
as belonging to an end-tag. After this "/" the set of elements it offers 
for this context is complete nonsense.