0

Oxygen is certainly the most common software used for digital editing, but it requires a licence, which can be a huge obstacle in teaching.

This is why I was wondering if BaseX could be an alternative.

One great advantage of Oxygen is that it permits the easy configuration of custom frameworks (cf. ediarum). It seems that we would have to create something similar in BaseX from scratch.

If anyone can point me to tutorials or even customizable components, I will be much obliged.

OnceUponATime
  • 450
  • 4
  • 12
  • BaseX is just an XML database and XQuery processor. That means 'storage'. I doubt, you will find anything for it, that resembles oXygen's authoring (or other) mode(s). You would need to write your own frontend (typically as a web application), which sounds like a year long undertaking. Couldn't your organisation get into talks with the oXygen guys? They have academic licenses. Maybe they sell also in volume? – amix Sep 30 '20 at 04:33
  • My institution used to buy licenses for all students, but I have now been told that they probably won't be able to renew these in 2021. Unfortunately, it cannot be taken for granted that university departments can spend money on specialised software at all. The students have access to licenses for software like PDF editors and other more generally used apps via the IT centre, but tools for digital editing aren't included. This is why open source alternatives would make life easier for all of us. – OnceUponATime Oct 03 '20 at 05:32
  • 1
    Besides oXygen I only heard (!) about other commercial offerings, such as [fonto-xml-editor](https://www.fontoxml.com/fonto-xml-editor). However, the "Personal Edition License" of [XMLMind](https://www.xmlmind.com) is free. I doubt, these offer customization, like oXygen. As for prior art, there is [dita4publishers](https://github.com/dita4publishers/org.dita4publishers.word2dita), and [transpect from Germany](http://transpect.github.io), for XML processing pipelines. You may want to ask the [XSL-List](https://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/), they have a better overview on the situation. – amix Oct 03 '20 at 07:36
  • 1
    Maybe this list could also be of help: https://github.com/topics/xml-editor – amix Oct 03 '20 at 07:48
  • Thanks for all your help, these look great. – OnceUponATime Oct 04 '20 at 22:19
  • I feel am combination of [QXML editor](http://qxmledit.org/) for creating XML files and BaseX for analysing them might be a good solution. – OnceUponATime Oct 09 '20 at 08:00
  • Interesting, I didn't know about QXML Editor. What mode did you use oXygen in? Was it the "Author" mode (and if so, was it oXygen's "Author" edition or was it a combination of "Author" and other modules of oXygen, incombination?), along with your own framework, *ediarum*? – amix Oct 11 '20 at 10:49
  • We're using "author" mode but also the debugger (in-built in the latest releases) to run XQuery for teaching. "Ediarum" is not "my" framework but a very popular framework for digital editing in the (German) humanities. We only really need frameworks for "real-life" edition projects, not for the samples we are creating with students. But of course, they ought to know what's out there. That's why I was wondering if there is any "established" open source XML editor. What I like about QXMLedit is that it is cross-platform. But I have seen good reviews for the Windows XML Notepad, too – OnceUponATime Oct 13 '20 at 21:37
  • I would recommend you to subscribe to the [xsl-list](https://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/) and the [xml-dev](http://www.xml.org/xml-dev/) mailing list. People there are having a very good overview and many do similar things. They definitely will be able to help. Personally, I think, that neither QXML nor XML Notepad will be able to achieve what you have in mind. Raw (or semi-raw) XML editing is maybe best achieved with a programmer's text editor like Emacs, SublimeText or VSCode, with an XML mode. [I think, Emacs' XML mode is pretty mature.](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/XmlModes) – amix Oct 14 '20 at 03:29
  • I signed up and will try and ask my questions there. I have now had confirmation that our institution will not pay for a student Oxygen licence in 2021. – OnceUponATime Oct 15 '20 at 11:51

1 Answers1

0

If you are looking for free XML editors, the post "The 5 Best Free XML Editors" has some useful suggestions for different operating systems.

Besides, I have tested QXMLEdit on Ubuntu and like its GUI and features:

QXmlEdit is a simple XML editor based on Qt libraries. Its main features are unusual data visualization modes, nice XML manipulation and presentation and it is multi platform. It can split very big XML files into fragments, and compare XML and XSD files. It was born on Google code (https://code.google.com/p/qxmledit). Latest release is 0.9.16 tagged on September 2020.

OnceUponATime
  • 450
  • 4
  • 12