Documentation file format

[John Ralls]

On Dec 16, 2013, at 7:47 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnucash-devel mailing list
>> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
>> 
> 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.


Will Lotus WordPro work with our DocBook files?

The only editor so far that I can recommend is the one Geert found, Serna (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sernafree.mirror/).

Regards,
John Ralls