Documentation file format

David Carlson david.carlson.417 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 16 22:47:00 EST 2013


On 12/16/2013 6:32 PM, Mike Alexander wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2013, at 5:49 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>> All of which is utterly moot, because it doesn’t work with our documents: It requires that you open each file separately for editing. It will display the whole document just fine, but it won’t let you edit anything that’s in a separate file. It’s too dumb, even when the master document is opened as a document set, to go look at the master document for the attribute references, so none of the chapter files will load.
> Editing entities inline is tougher than you think because entities can have quite a different environment than the parent document.  This is probably not true of GnuCash documents, but in the general case can be.  I was involved  in implementing that one time and it's not trivial.  It's more likely that they allow editing of XIncludes inline than entities (although I haven't looked so I don't know for sure) and we could probably change things to use them instead of entities.
>
>             Mike
>  
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As a non-developer who is used to simple editors like e-mail editors up
to the various Office Suite editors, I can report that my first try to
generate a patch file with TortoiseGit was not completely successful,
but it seemed close enough for that example. 

One of the difficulties that I had was figuring out which steps had to
be done online or offline and in which order in which software since
there were several programs and files involved in that unfamiliar
setting.  I thought I was juggling six bowling pins at once.

I think that a developer could put together an instruction sheet with
all the specific details to use it on those specific GnuCash documents
in the current format.  John already put most of it earlier in this thread.

If there were some references to examples of similar XML, the form of
the syntax is easy, but valid tags and their definitions for that
particular style and nesting are not so easy, but not too hard either.

I still have a working copy of Lotus WordPro which even today is my
favorite editor for certain types of documents and XML is one of those
types.  In Windows with the end-of-line issue, a recommendation for an
editor that respects that would help too.

David C


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