Proposal for Implementing a Docbook Editor

[Jeff Fearn]

satya komaragiri wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am a final year undergraduate student from India and I plan to apply
> for Google Summer of Code. I would like to implement a Docbook editor.
> I discussed this idea with Mr. Yaakov Nemoy (cc'ed in this mail) who
> has agreed and is guiding me through the process.
> 
> The Docbook editor will make it easy to write documentation through a
> wysiwyg interface. Since Docbook has a great collection of XSLs[1] it
> will be easy to convert it to HTML and write a web based editor.
> 
> My research has pointed me to Beacon[2], which is a similar editor for
> GuideXML (Gentoo's documentation format). It uses an XSLT engine to
> transform XML to HTML and vice versa. I contacted the developer of
> this project and it seems like this project has been in hibernation
> for couple of months or so. But the codebase is quite developed and
> should be easy to work with. The developers were also making it a
> generic plug-able framework for easy integration of other doc types.
> 
> Since it is a web-based editor, we can integrate this into the Fedora
> documentation site for easy editing and creation.
> 
> It would be very nice if the Docs team could provide some feedback on
> what they feel about  a web-based GUI editor which would eliminate the
> need for knowing the Docbook XML format. If I am given a go ahead, I
> would like to put this up as a Feature.
> 
> Regards,
> Satya Komaragiri
> 
> 
> [1]  Existing XSL for Docbook:
> http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookXslStylesheets
> [2]  Beacon: http://beacon.kix.in/
> 

Have you considered?

Web based access to eclipse editor:

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/eclifox

Visual DocBook editor for eclipse:

http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/HowToCreateAVisualDocBookEditorIn10Minutes

Combine the two:

<insert summer of code project here>

Ew java, I feel dirty ... but someone had to ask :(

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY