Re: Much appreciation

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Re: Much appreciation
by Bertram on Friday 26/Aug/2005, @02:11

Quanta is a great tool. Thanks!

My problem with KDE documentation is the lack of unification in structure and style. Probably a docbook template for quanta would improve this.

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Re: Much appreciation
by Carlos Leonhard Woelz on Friday 26/Aug/2005, @05:10

The KDE Documentation primer tries to address this in the "what to cover" section. But in the end, it is up to the documenter to follow it. I think that KDE documentation is picking up, really. So maybe, in the future, we would be able to review all the docs to check for some kind of guidelines conformance. But at the moment, if the doc is good, (independent of the structure), it is probably a big improvement.

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Re: Much appreciation
by Eric Laffoon on Friday 26/Aug/2005, @11:55

One of our goals for Quanta has been the visual creation of XML docs using CSS or XSLT. Initially we thought CSS might already work, but I haven't seen that yet. XSLT would be the coolest. There are XSL files to make HTML docs from KDE Docbook and they look pretty much like the final results in the help browser. So you could identify your XSL file and then create docs with templates and toolbars similar to a word processing feel.

This type of functionality will very likely be in Quanta 4.0. The enhancements with Webcore and the work Frans Englich is doing with KDOM will mean that we should be able to do this without having to write most of the code needed. In my opinion what has been needed is a visual document creation tool. Yes, programmers can easily understand C++ and XML is not too hard for the average user... But in both cases this is some effort required. In the visual creation mode it is possible not only to instantly see the result of an edit, but it will also rigidly enforce the DTD.

Not to diminish what Carlos has done, because I think his work means there will be more and better documentation in KDE now, but I think when KDE 4 arrives there will be no excuse not to have documentation being generated by someone invloved with a project. I hope this gets more users involved.

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Re: Much appreciation
by Masert on Saturday 27/Aug/2005, @07:20

Isn't there also a K-XML-Tool?

Why do it with Quanta?

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Re: Much appreciation
by Andras Mantia on Saturday 27/Aug/2005, @08:15

Why not?

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Re: Much appreciation
by Eric Laffoon on Saturday 27/Aug/2005, @19:48

There is KMXL editor, which can also operate as a plugin within Quanta. It breaks everything into nodes you can view, but it doesn't seem to particulary flow. Last I checked it also didn't do structural DTD based validation, custom editing toolbars, templates, entities and auto completion among other things. For working with relatively static files it is a nice tool with a tree mode, although Quanta does have a structure tree too. There is also Syntext Serena which can visually work with XSLT, but it's a commercial tool with a license cost to use it for any purpose. Kate can also be used with much of the functionality of Quanta but Quanta adds the toolbars and dialogs and can also use Kate's custom plugins.

So the answer to your question is that Quanta, with the docbook editing tools, is the most specialized tool to ease development on KDE, unless of course you want to buy a commercial visual tool. BTW Quanta will be competitive with that tool in KDE 4.

I would also like to say that if you're saying "Quanta is an HTML editor so why use it for Docbook" then I would say that is flat wrong. Quanta is not an HTML editor. It's an SGML/XML editor. It just has the most support packages for HTML, but even HTML isn't HTML any more. It's XHTML, XML, PHP and a lot of other things. Because people may think of Quanta as an HTML editor, like for instance NVU, we need to bring to their attention that it is designed with a broader scope. If we had made an HTML editor in the 3x series we would have been engineering future obsolescence.

So there is a reason to use Quanta for Docbook as well as a reason to make people aware that it has advantages.

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