Re: Authoring Tools WAS: Switching to XML

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:
> On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 13:34 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I tried opening postgres.xml in OpenOffice 2.0, and it just showed me
>> the raw text and markup --- no indication that it understood xml at all.
>> Is there some special incantation needed?

> I found that I had to remove the <? xml declartion and only have the
> docbook dtd declartion.

> Warning, it is ugly :) but it does indeed work.

Only for exceedingly small values of "work".  I tried that, and got
a display showing all the text run together in a single paragraph.
I changed one word and re-saved, and got a file that had basically
nothing to do with the original --- it's been arbitrarily reformatted,
and most of the original markup is gone.

Perhaps later versions are better, but the OO version currently available
in Fedora 5 appears utterly useless for our purposes.

Can you show me an authoring tool that does *not* think it's OK to
mangle the low-level text in "semantically irrelevant" ways?  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.

            regards, tom lane