WYSIWYG XML Editor (Visual XML editor)
The Author mode of the
<oXygen/> XML Editor demonstrates a new productive way of editing XML
documents, similar to a word processor.
<oXygen/> makes XML document authoring easier than editing with an
unstructured word processing application. The author's focus is on the
semantics of the XML content he/she enters while the formatting and layout
is performed automatically by <oXygen/> XML Editor.
Based on W3C standards
As always, <oXygen/> does not try to reinvent the
wheel and does not lock users into custom formats. The WYSIWYG like
rendering is driven by CSS stylesheets conforming with the W3C CSS 2.1
specification. Some enhancements introduced by the W3C CSS 3 working
draft like CSS XML namespaces and the attr function are
also supported.
The simplest way to edit an XML document visually is to associate it
a CSS that defines the styles for the XML elements the document is
using. The association is done by inserting in the document header the
standard xml-stylesheet processing instruction.
The same file, in the Author visual editing mode:
Ready to use support for major XML document frameworks
The tagless editor comes with ready to use support
for largely used XML frameworks: DITA, DocBook
4 / DocBook 5, TEI P4 /
TEI P5, XHTML. This support
includes document templates for easily creating new XML instances, CSS
for WYSIWYG like editing, interface actions for creating and editing
lists, tables and marking up specific content, XML Catalogs for faster
access to resources, schema files for validation, transformation
scenarios to convert from XML to HTML and/or
PDF.
Extensible
You can create your own editing framework, similar to the ones that
are preconfigured in <oXygen/>. See this section: Extensible XML Editor .
CALS and HTML table support
The CALS Table Model is a standard for representing
tables in SGML/XML. The editor supports the CALS table model for DocBook
and DITA. The HTML table model is supported for XHTML and
DocBook.
In case you are customizing the editor for an XML framework that uses
other types of tables, you can write a Java extension for describing the
number of rows and columns a cell may span. To describe what elements
enter the tables, rows and cells you must use the standard CSS
display property with the values: "table",
"table-row", "table-cell", etc.. For more information, see the User Manual.
XML Content Completion - Fast Editing
Just press the Enter key and you will have the list
of all XML elements that can be inserted at the caret position.
In the following figure it was selected the word W3C. By pressing
ENTER, the word can be enclosed in XML markup. In our case, the
acronym element.
Drag and drop editing
The Author mode allows drag and drop editing. You
can select the XML content then drag and drop it in the desired location
to move or copy that content.
Know where you are when editing
Hiding the XML markup can have the disadvantage of
losing the visual markers (the element tags) between text nodes.
Fortunately, <oXygen/> has a solution for this: the location tooltip
combined with the marks from the XML outliner and with the location bar
allows you to know at each moment what is the current location in the
document. Additionally, there are several levels of display for XML
element tags ranging from no tags to full tags.
Full XML markup control
<oXygen/> combines the easy way of working in a
visual WYSIWYG like XML editor with the full power of XML source
editing. Also, the Outliner view, which is synchronized
with the edited XML document, shows the entire markup structure.
Document Navigation Using Links
With the navigation links support it becomes easy
to go from a DITA conref to the referred content, from a DocBook link to
the target element or from an XInclude reference to the included
content, etc. by just a single click.
The links are specified in the associated CSS
using the custom property link . <oXygen/> can open
the referred document and show the linked element each time you click on
a link in the Author mode. The DITA, TEI and DocBook CSS stylesheets
were updated to this new support. Links are automatically created for
the included/referenced XML content: for XInclude, for DITA conref,
DocBook link and xref elements.
<oXygen/> identifies the target element using its
ID attribute or using an XPointer element scheme expression. You may
read more about adding links and how to use them for your type of XML
documents in the User
Guide.
In the above figure clicking the blue text makes the editor place the
caret at the position of the referred element. Navigating through a
large XML document had never been so easy!
Find All Elements Action
The Find All Elements action is
available in all the XML editor modes: Text,
Author and Grid. It represents an
easy way to search for XML elements by their tag names, attribute names
and values.
Full integration in the <oXygen/> XML Editor
The WYSIWYG like editor was closely integrated in
<oXygen/> as an editor tab called Author next to the
Text and Grid editing modes. All
<oXygen/>'s powerful editing actions are also available in the Author
mode. These include: spell checking (on request and as you type), XML
validation (continuous, on request), search and replace, XPath
execution, etc. Also all side views that <oXygen/> provides are
offering information when editing in Author mode.
Other Visual Editors:
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Mac OS X
Linux/Unix
