[osis-core] Re: Open source XML editor....

[Steven DeRose]

Have now played with jEdit a little; it's impressively fast for being 
in Java, and very full-featured. Syntax hightlighting for XML works, 
but is a little simplistic. Apparently driven by a config file 
(itself in XML), so could probably hack it pretty nicely for 
OSIS-specific coloring.

Main problem is that it doesn't do any real formatting. But I'll bet 
there's a bit more one can do, such as auto-indenting constructs; and 
it might not take a whole lot of work to let a syntax-coloring 
definition specify not just color, but also font, size, and indent -- 
which would probably suffice for general editing. Will read up and 
see if there's much more one can do just at the config level, or if 
such tweaks would reqire mucking around in the core. The app in only 
136K, so there can't be that much code there.

It does claim to support Unicode, plus many other encodings including 
shift-JIS (popular Japanese encoding); and has a macro language and a 
plugin API. And it does proportional fonts fine, so at least it's 
clearly not based on a row/column model of the screen. And, it has a 
synchronized scrolling features for multiple panes, which i'll bet we 
could hack to do the right thing (currently I think it just goes by 
line numbers).

It's a nice looking tool....

At 03:05 PM -0400 05/07/02, Steven DeRose wrote:
>Has anybody played with jEdit? Entire editor in Java/Swing. 
>Apparently has plug-ins to support something like 70 syntaxes, 
>including XML. See review at 
>http://www.linuxmuse.com/articles.php?action=section&article=14&num=1
>Main page for it at http://www.jedit.org/    Feature listing at 
>http://www.jedit.org/index.php?page=features
>
>I wonder what it would take to build a custom mode for OSIS 
>(basically hack the XML mode so it also knows about milestones, and 
>so it provides all the right menus for tagging easily.
>
>If we had that, plus a plug-in that could do verse-checking, and one 
>to pull up multiple texts in parallel windows, we'd have a pretty 
>good deal.
>
>Not sure what level of formatting it does other than indentation -- 
>but as long as it can do arbitrary fonts and a few things like 
>color, italics, and bold, it would probably be a pretty good place 
>to start.
>
>Thoughts? Anybody want to take a shot at making it work for us
>
>S
>--
>
>Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
>Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
>Email: sderose@speakeasy.net
>Backup email: sderose@mac.com, sjd@stg.brown.edu


-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@speakeasy.net
Backup email: sderose@mac.com, sjd@stg.brown.edu