Hi devs, I've recently (too late ;-) read that we (Chris White?) had proposed the GuideXML editor project for GSoC. I have some ideas to describe here, and (possibly) willing to act as a co-mentor for this challenge.
It is interesting that we've already approached this task at Russian doc translation project (as entire Gentoo is suffering from the lack of such tools): We had to choose the basic platform for wysiwyg editing (among some existing tools), and had thought of the following: 1. The doc editor should be as similar to a regular word processor, as possible. 2. It should have some spell checking tools included. 3. It should be internationalized. 4. There should be a bunch of compatible editors not to be ever stuck on single tool. 5. Gentoo project itself is not much about wysisyg editing tool, so we shoudn't do it from scratch. Hopefully, we've found many of open and closed source tools that can accopplish this task. Here's some of them we think suitable, all can be easily adapted to GuideXML by templates: 1. OpenOffice.org (xslt) 2. Vex (css) 3. Serna (xslt) 4. XMLmind (custom) (I think this list is still very incomplete) The main problem is completely different (as we could see): all the WYSIWYG tools seem to break initial internal document format making it completely unusable for CVS storage and DIFF (although we could switch to XML diff, I don't really think it's yet reasonable for next 1-2 years). So, we have proposed to split the entire task into these two: Step A. Make a 'TidyGuide' XSLT that can format (or restore format of) any valid GuideXML document after processing by WYSIWYG editor, and just before commit. XSL was chosen as a platform-independent technology (you can apply it on file save in almost any editor, or even in CVS itself). This way, we overcome the main problem of existing WYSIWYG editors. Step B. Prepate templates for any editors you like -- there is no problem as we haven't to deal with internal formatting anymore. So, although this effort was actually started within Russian Documentation Project (unfinished yet), I think it makes sense to bring it to Gentoo mainstream. You can look at current projects' repo at https://svn.shadanakar.org/rugentoo/ru/guidexml/ (comments to code are still in Russian, but the code itself is self-descriptive) Screenshots of WYSIWYG GuideXML in Serna and XMLMind are available at http://www.chumakov.ru/gentoo/technology/xml-editors.html (in Russian, too, but not a problem as the pictures are self-descriptive, too), those for vex project--at https://confluence.concord.org/display/CCTR/Gentoo+GuideXML+with+Vex If it's interesting, I could convert all these comments into English (and translate existing TidyGuide software requirements specification, too) and contrubute all that code to Gentoo in a couple of days. So, what do you think about all this? Is is interesting enough? Could I become a co-mentor for GuideXML wysiwyg project? -- Alexey Chumakov Gentoo Russian Documentation Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
