<oXygen/> XML Author is derived from the <oXygen/> XML Editor IDE, its main
features focusing on CSS visual
XML editing and XML source editing. Other features include:
- Remote Editing over FTP, HTTP/WebDAV
and HTTPS/WebDAV
Documents can be stored on WebDAV or FTP servers. Using <oXygen/> XML Author
you can browse the content of the repositories, load and save the
documents.
- Database support
Using the Database perspective you can browse tables or collections from
databases, inspect or modify data, specify XML Schemas for the XML fields and
collections.
- Subversion (SVN) Client
<oXygen/> XML Author makes easier the document sharing between content authors
by including a Apache SubversionTM (SVN) client. The SVN client allows
you to browse repositories, check for changes, commit changes, update your working
copy and examine the revision history.
- Files and Directories
comparison tools
A complete diff and merge solution is available in <oXygen/> XML Author. It
offers both directory and file comparison, six different diff algorithms and
multiple levels of comparison.
- XML Digital Signature and XML
Canonicalization
The digital signature is a requirement when exchanging information in an
untrusted network. Since XML is used for content storage it is important to be able
to sign the XML files or messages.
- XPath support
XPath is a language for addressing specific parts of an XML document. XPath,
like the Document Object Model (DOM), models an XML document as a tree of nodes. An
XPath expression is a mechanism for navigating through and selecting nodes from the
XML document. You can execute XPath queries on opened documents. Both XPath versions
1.0 and 2.0 are supported.
- Microsoft® Office
2007 - Office Open XML (OOXML)
<oXygen/> XML Author offers support for editing, transforming and validating
documents composing the Office Open XML (OOXML) package directly through the archive
support. This support is also available for other zipped files.
- Open Document Format
(ODF)
<oXygen/> XML Author allows you to extract, validate, edit and process the XML data
stored in OpenDocument files and any other ZIP-based archive. These capabilities
allow developers to use data from ODF documents together with validation and
transformations (using XSLT or XQuery) to other file formats.
<oXygen/> XML Author Frameworks
The main frameworks available in <oXygen/> XML Author are:
- DocBook WYSIWYG Editor
<oXygen/> XML Author comes with the DocBook DTDs and XSL stylesheets for
generating HTML and Formatting Objects files. Writing a document in DocBook and
publishing it is now a simple task.
- DITA WYSIWYG Editor
<oXygen/> XML Author allows the users with less knowledge of XML to edit DITA
documents in a similar way to a regular text processing application. The DITA Open
Toolkit is included in the standard <oXygen/> XML Author distribution allowing
publishing of DITA Maps to different output formats.
- TEI WYSIWYG Editor
<oXygen/> XML Author comes with the TEI DTDs and stylesheets. Just as with the
DocBook framework writing and publishing a TEI document is very
easy.
- XHTML WYSIWYG Editor
<oXygen/> XML Author includes schemas, catalogs and templates for XHTML. You
can create documents conforming either to transitional or strict XHTML DTDs.
The Best Visual Editing Experience
<oXygen/> uses a number of information sources (like the document structure defined
by the schema, the CSS used for rendering, etc.) to provide the best editing experience
when you edit visually so that you can get intuitive results for your editing
actions.
<oXygen/> lets you be in control of your document, it provides location feedback
and requires understanding only two basic editing concepts:
- You know where you are!
There are many non-intrusive indicators that mark and inform you about the
current position in the document: location tooltips, current element highlight,
current element range, breadcrumb showing the location path, synchronized outline
with position markers.
- Type to enter content
To add content, just go to the position you want to insert content and type it
there.
- Press Enter for markup
To enter markup (elements,
comments, processing instructions) just go to the position you want and press
Enter. <oXygen/> will show you what options are available and will help you to
quickly choose one of them. If you want to wrap some content in an element, just
select that and press Enter to choose the element. In addition to the available
XML elements, <oXygen/> shows also the user defined XML templates
(snippets).
The schema information is used to guide you to enter valid markup, to check if the
editing operations results do not violate the schema constraints and also to modify
dynamically the editing actions according with the constrains from the schema while
keeping their results intuitive, avoiding as much as possible creating invalid
content.
<oXygen/> uses the CSS information to react specifically if you edit in a block
element, in an inline or in an element space where the whitespace should be
preserved.
The user editing experience can be further improved for a specific grammar
(framework) by using the open API available in the oXygen Author SDK to contribute
framework specific actions or editing behaviour. The default DITA, DocBook, TEI, XHTML,
etc. support that comes with oXygen is just an example of using this open API and the
customizations are available together with the source code as part of the Author
SDK.
Advanced Editing
Features
- Change
Tracking
Change Tracking is a way to
keep a history of the changes made to a document. When change tracking is enabled, the
inserted and deleted content is highlighted in the document allowing you to easily
identify the affected regions. Also, tracked changes can be rendered in callouts
(balloons) displayed at the side of the document, with connecting lines pointing to the
changed content.
- Content Annotations/Comments
When you annotate your XML
documents, the comments are displayed in the Author view as side callouts (balloons)
showing also additional information like the author and the comment time.
- Profiling/Conditional Text for Any XML Document
Conditional text is a way to mark
blocks of text meant to appear in some renditions of the document but not in others. For
instance you can mark a section of a document to be included in the manual designated for
the 'expert' users, other for the 'novice' users manual
while unmarked sections are included in any rendition.