Structured Authoring and Its Tools

Genuine structured authoring tools have a reputation for being expensive. With few exceptions, that reputation is well deserved. The best known and most widely used tools are Author/Editor by SoftQuad, DynaText by EBT, and ADEPT*Editor by ArborText. They make it difficult for you to create a document that does not structurally follow your DTD. Once you have mapped in your DTD, these tools do not allow you to create a component outside of its parent element. When you author inside a particular element, you can create only the subelements specified in the content model for it.

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• See “SGML Authoring Tools,” p. 434

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Newer tools are being developed all the time to bridge the gap between word processor add-ons and true structured authoring tools. This is the latest trend in structured authoring. Because HTML plug-in authoring tools have become so amazingly popular, everyone is sure to appreciate easy-to-use SGML authoring tools that you can plug in to Word or WordPerfect.

Hybrid tools combine the best features of dedicated SGML authoring tools with the convenience of word processors. They make word processors even more powerful and useful. Figure 15.5 shows Near & Far Author. Its document structuring capability keeps you honest when you create SGML documents.

Fig. 15.5  Near & Far Author keeps you honest when you author highly structured SGML documents from within Word.

From Here…

You have seen how to create SGML documents from scratch and convert non-SGML documents into SGML documents. Public domain and commercial applications can help you transform document type instances for one DTD into document instances for another—one reason why you put all those tags in your documents.

For more information, refer to the following:

•  Chapter 16, “Markup Challenges and Specialized Content,” covers specialized markup situations.

•  Part V, “SGML and the World Wide Web,” discusses how SGML and the Web have changed each other forever.

•  Part VII, “SGML Tools and Their Uses,” goes into more detail about the tools mentioned in this chapter. Tools for the PC, the Mac, and UNIX machines are discussed.