[Advacs-discuss] docbook xml and tools

[Helmut Wollmersdorfer]

Yesterday I installed a lot of docbook stuff and searched for supporting 
tools.

Emacs and (g)vim is sayed to have some docbook support, but I didn't try it.

Now I found and tried Quanta 
http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/quanta which needs KDE. Features 
of Quanta are:
- syntax highligthing for a lot of languages including docbook
   (nearly everything like Perl, Python, HTML, SQL, XML)
- lint for some languages
- validation for some languages
- hiding and displaying of groups of lines according to the
   hierarchical structure of data (e.g. in XML)
- support of most character encodings
- spell check (aspell, ispell, hspell)
- integration of cervisia (CVS frontend)
- diffing

Quanta is IMHO an alternative for somebody, who likes graphical editors 
and does not want to invest time into learning emacs or vim.

Quanta is a little bit unstable and buggy. I experienced a crash 
yesterday. So be carefully and save your work periodically.

Aspell for German does not work correctly in UTF-8 for the words with 
accented characters. Unfortunately the whole editor needs to be 
reconfigured, if you want to change from English to German spell check - 
design error. This is a little disadvantage for me, as I often work on 
files in different languages at the same time.

As it is the same problem with all editors, search and replace is 
relatively poor compared against full featured regular expressions of Perl.

Cervisia has poor support of CVS. You have to mark the files that you 
want to add, commit or delete to CVS. But maybe this is easier for CVS 
beginners.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer