I've had been busy doing not one but two authoring environments for XMetaL 5.1. I have to say that it's been a very pleasant experience, in spite for my strong dislike for .NET Studio. I've criticized JustSystems for that before, though, so I won't go there for the time being. Instead I'll add my more recent (mostly positive) reflections...
The scripting/macro environment is dead easy to use, even for an amateur programmer like me. I've created dialogs that change content in various ways while traversing the document tree, I've added ID generation code for the my link target elements, I've implemented SVG viewing capabilities, and more, mostly without cursing. I've stopped trying to delegate every programming task to my colleagues, that's how comfortable I am with it.
The editor itself is still the best XML editor I know of. If you are a professional (technical) writer there just isn't anything better available out there. For shorter documents, sure, a text editor will do, or perhaps something like Oxygen, but for anything approaching book length, I much prefer a non-geek tool that allows me to focus on content rather than structure when writing, and structure rather than content when editing.
Found an old bug, though: You can still make XMetaL crash by trying to drag & drop a toolbar button on a new toolbar, if that toolbar doesn't have the "flat look". I think this one's been an issue since 2.0 but I'd have to check my notes to be sure. (Just try exiting the toolbar dialog and KABOOM!)
And finally there's another little thing bugging me: I have some old XMetaL dialogs that I like to use when needed, created using version 2.0. XMetaL can use them, no problem, but it can't import them for editing in the new dialog editor. Fairly annoying, in my humble opinion.
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4 comments:
Hi,
I am having issues with upgrading XMetal 3 to XMetal 5.1.
The XMetal 5.1 is not able to pick css the same way as Xmetal 3 did.?
Can you help ?
What kind of issues? What's the problem you have with your CSS stylesheets? In my experience, XM5.1 does everything that XM3 did. I've run stylesheets made for XM 3.1 with XM 5.1 without any problem.
Could it be a CSS stylesheet left in your Documents and Settings folder, somewhere? I've found that the XMetaL uninstall sometimes isn't as complete as one would like, but I've also found that it could well be a Windows issue rather than an XMetaL issue.
Cheers,
/Ari
Hi,
We are having multiple work Directories created in our C drive. The CSS are not getting picked up from where there should be , rather we are having new css being created.
# Defines local path for configuration files (*.ctm, *.css, *.rlx, *.tbr)
remote_edit_temp_dir = C:\Atlas\XMetaL
We have multiple folders being created with the name starting from XMetaL.
In XMetal 3 we used ,
# Normally, there is no need to change the following...
rgb_txt = ${SQDIR}\rgb.txt
styles_path = ${SQDIR}\display
rules_path = ${SQDIR}\rules
rules_file = xmetal.rlx
rules_file_HTML = HTML.rls
and it used to pick the CSS , but now in 5.1 we need to explicitly set the styles_path to the css folder location.
It will be great if you can help us.
You don't have your CSS i Author/Display? It's been my experience that XMetaL will look there first, and, if that fails, try to create default CSS in whatever location the document is.
Sorry, I don't really know how to help, except that I'd suggest you to join the XMetaL community forum at http://forums.xmetal.com/. The XMetaL folks read that forum regularly and respond whenever they can.
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