Proposal for Implementing a Docbook Editor

[satya komaragiri]

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/