Subject: Re: Authoring Tools WAS: Switching to XML
From: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>,
	David Fetter <david@fetter.org>,
	Guillaume Lelarge <guillaume@lelarge.info>, pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
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Organization: Command Prompt, Inc.
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:23:28 -0800
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> Can you show me an authoring tool that does *not* think it's OK to
> mangle the low-level text in "semantically irrelevant" ways?

No. :) I mentioned this previously. Any word processor is going to blow
stuff away in an ugly way. The closest we could get is:

Create a custom style in OpenOffice that works in a similar fashion to
PostgreSQL.

Use Tidy and or a custom script to clean after the fact.

IMHO the only tools for Docbook that are usable are editors, preferrably
validating editors such as Emacs, Bluefish (actually Word Perfect does
this too). We are not going to get what we want out of WYSIWYG.


>   We might
> as well forget about the concept of a doc patch if people start using
> tools like this --- if a one-word change results in diffs across the
> whole file, the tool is not usable.

You are correct, we would have to run some kind of clean script and then
diff between the two versions.


Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake


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