Dear all, Yesterday, as agreed during the meeting, I wrote to the XML Mind developers. Now we have a response, but unfortunately, it's not positive. I could insist, but the answer left no door open. As suggested, we could build our own customization for such editor. Anyway, I think this issue is not of high priority to the TEI. We can discuss it later... Best, Alex.- PS: Tomorrow, please don't change the restaurant... it's too cold out there... :-)
Alejandro Bia wrote:
Dear XML Mind developers,
My name is Alejandro Bia and I'm writing as a member of the TEI Council (technical steering group of the Text Encoding Initiative): http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/
I was asked to contact you, to see if you would be interested in building a customized version ("special edition") of XML Mind for the TEI users community, as you already have special editions for DocBook, DITA and XHTML.
TEI is a widely used XML vocabulary that became the de-facto standard for Digital Humanities, with a large community of users worldwide. Oxygen XML Editor offers customizations for TEI,
SyncRO Soft the company behind Oxygen XML Editor has much, much more (10x? 20x?) work force than Pixware, the company behind XMLmind.
as well as for DocBook, so we asked ourselves: why not have a TEI customized version of XML Mind as well?
Two reasons for that:
1) To my knowledge, the TEI vocabulary is at least as huge as DocBook's or DITA's.
Developing a configuration for TEI at least as comprehensive as the configurations for DocBook, DITA or XHTML (toolbar, menu, templates, etc) would take at least 3 months for hard work for an experienced XMLmind engineer.
We are not sure that this investment, which is quite important for us (~30,000), would repay.
2) A French public organization -- Biblissima, http://www.biblissima-condorcet.fr/en -- is (was?) supposed to develop an XMLmind configuration for TEI.
This TEI add-on for XMLmind is intended to be released publicly as free, open source, software.
They started years ago. They didn't deliver anything.
I've seen a prototype a couple years ago and, in my opinion, it had usability problems and, in term of functions, it was far from what is offered by our stock DocBook, DITA or XHTML configurations (e.g. XMLmind XML Editor - DocBook Support, http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/docbook/index.html)
I'm already recommending the XML Mind personal edition to my text encoding students, but a customized version would make it easier to use. Students don't like to pay for software licenses, but later they may get to work in encoding projects who would buy the required software.
Thank you for doing that, but without a proper configuration XMLmind XML Editor is quite unusable to author TEI documents.
If you are interested in this idea, contact me, so that we can provide the necessary information and technical stuff for the customization.
Sorry but we currently don't have sufficient resources to implement a good XMLmind configuration for TEI.
You should consider doing that yourself (with the help of students of course). This is a lot of work, but it's a quite straightforward task.
More information here:
XMLmind XML Editor - Configuration and Deployment http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/configure/index.html
Best regards, Alex Bia.-
--------------------------------------------------------- Dr. ALEJANDRO BIA e-mail: abia@umh.es
CIO (Operations Research Center) Deputy Director of DEMI (Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science), Area of Languages and Computing Systems Secretary of the HDH (Hispanic Digital Humanities) association Member of the TEI Council (Text Encoding Initiative)
Miguel Hernández University Torretamarit building Av. Universidad s/n, E-03202, Elche, SPAIN http://dhw.umh.es/alex-bia/index.php?lang=eng Phone: +34 644447008 Skype: alex-bia ---------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------- ALEJANDRO BIA e-mail: abia@umh.es CIO - DEMI Centro de Investigación Operativa Departamento de Estadística, Matemáticas e Informática Área de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos Universidad Miguel Hernández Ed. Torretamarit, Av. Universidad s/n, CP:03202, Elche, ESPAÑA Web: http://dhw.umh.es/alex-bia/ Tel: +34 966658973 Móvil: +34 644447008 Skype: alex-bia --------------------------------------------------------- --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus