![]() ![]() This makes collaborative reviewing easier. Comments, added text, and deleted text are grouped in a separate panel that does not clutter up the main editing workspace. ![]() You can see changes as callouts or in a new reviewing panel. With release 14.2 there is now support for multiple authors (colour coded). OXygen has long had MS Word-like change tracking – it provides colour highlighting to changed text, and inserts change bars in the XML. What does come out of the box are a number of samples that use the forms tool, so you can easily learn how it works, or even modify one of the samples to suit your situation. This is huge, and I believe the impact of this feature will be enormous in the long run. OXygen doesn’t do this out of the box, of course, but with a minimum of knowledge about writing CSS code, and using oXygen’s extensions, you can design a forms-based master that authors can use to write their content, without thinking about XML, output formats, or anything except the sense and structure of what they are writing. When writing a module, what the author needs to see is not how one of those particular formats will appear, but how text is grouped, gathered, and structured, so that it makes sense, and so it fits together with other text modules. In short, we are in a world of structured authoring, where the output is assembled modularly, and where we publish to many different formats with many different displays. It uses a custom CSS that lets a document architect design an authoring environment in which the writer never has to look at an XML tag, but where s/he does have to choose from available structural options, and make choices that correspond to attributes for the elements selected.Ī writer who is not interested in XML will never know s/he is producing it. The forms tool allows you to do just that. Why not be able to just select that from a drop-down list? Let the software decide which tag to use! The author cares about what the function of this particular bit of text is. OXygen’s forms tool takes us to a higher meta-level: forget seeing what you get, let’s have WYSIWYN (my coinage, probably not unique): What You See Is What You Need.Īn author writing text does not care if the tag associated with the text s/he is writing is a or a tag. Is it necessary to see how the text will be displayed? If so, and if you are single sourcing and multi-channel publishing, which channel do you need to see, and when? What information does an author really need? Does s/he need to see XML tags, or are there better ways to define structure? etc. Some of what has been discussed there centres around the tools an author needs to be able to do her or his work properly. The Content Wrangler Community on LinkedIn has been having a lively debate on the possible imminent death of WYSIWYG editing. Enhanced reviewing aids (introduced in 14.2). ![]() Forms based attribute editing for authors and SME’s (introduced in 14.1).I can’t and won’t cover a long list, but will call out two recent additions that are worthy of special consideration for content developers: The list of features in oXygen, whether in the authoring package or the development package, is immense – and most of them are really useful, which is really rare. ![]() It has connectors to software version control, and component CMS systems, as well. OXygen is packaged in a variety of formats: standalone desktop client, Java Web Start (thin) client, or as an Eclipse plugin. To the best of my knowledge, oXygen is the only product of its type that is totally cross-platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris. The author tool supports Microsoft Open Office XML (OOXML) as well as the Open Document Format (ODF) used by Open Office and its descendents. The developer tools include converters between different schema languages. DITA publishing is done through the DITA Open Toolkit. It successfully and seamlessly integrates a number of tools, including validation software and rendering engines, many of them open source, to help XML authors and developers do their work. oXygen XML Editor packages all of these together.oXygen XML Developer is an environment for editing and developing DTD, CSS, XQuery, XSLT, and a variety of schema languages.oXygen XML Author is an XML content authoring tool.OXygen, in fact, is not a product, but a suite of products: In fact, the release of 14.2 is simply an excuse to review the product as a whole, something I feel I ought to do, after reviewing Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite 4 in this blog. This was especially the case with release 14.1 that included forms based editing of XML attributes – about which more in a moment. I use quotes because Syncro Soft, the publisher of oXygen, regularly includes major new features in these free, “incremental” upgrades. OXygen’s new release is part of the company’s policy of regularly (every three or four months) releasing “incremental” upgrades. ![]()
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