XML editors

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Revision as of 09:27, 12 February 2015 by Unhammer (talk | contribs) (man the state of FOSS XML editors sucks (unless you use emacs))
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Some XML editors used to edit Apertium language data (e.g. dix and transfer files):

  • Gedit – a GUI editor (written in C/Python)
    • Does syntax highlighting for XML out of the box, which does show some well-formedness errors
    • There's an XML validation plugin at https://launchpad.net/gedit-xmltools but it only works with gedit2
  • XML Copy Editor – a GUI editor (written in C++) purely meant for XML
    • XML Copy Editor will check well-formedness (that you have your brackets and quotes in place) out of the box
    • To get validation you may have to click XML→Associate→System DTD and select dix.dtd from lttoolbox (typically in /usr/local/share/lttoolbox or /usr/share/lttoolbox). This will insert a DOCTYPE line in your xml, but that's fine.
    • There seems to be a bug that gives wrong line numbers on some validation errors.
  • Jedit – a GUI editor (written in Java)
  • Vim – a lightweight, modal editor
  • Emacs – a self-documenting, extensible lisp machine


Converting DTD to XSD/RNC/RNG

An XML editor can check if you XML is well-formed (the brackets match up and so on), but to check for validity, you need to give it the schema for the file type you're editing. Some editors can read the DTD schemas in the lttoolbox/apertium directories, while some editors require other schema formats.

The java program "trang" can convert the dix and transfer DTD's to other formats like XSD, RNC or RNG, if your favourite editor doesn't support DTD's.

cd
wget http://jing-trang.googlecode.com/files/trang-20091111.zip
unzip trang-20091111.zip
cd trang-20091111

java -jar trang.jar -I dtd -O xsd ~/src/apertium/trunk/lttoolbox/lttoolbox/dix.dtd ~/src/apertium/trunk/lttoolbox/lttoolbox/dix.xsd
java -jar trang.jar -I dtd -O rng ~/src/apertium/trunk/lttoolbox/lttoolbox/dix.dtd ~/src/apertium/trunk/lttoolbox/lttoolbox/dix.rng
java -jar trang.jar -I dtd -O rnc ~/src/apertium/trunk/lttoolbox/lttoolbox/dix.dtd ~/src/apertium/trunk/lttoolbox/lttoolbox/dix.rnc

See also