| Overview The number of SGML projects in the humanities is on the rise. With the increase in popularity of the TEI P3 (the document type definition (DTD) of the Text Encoding Initiative) and the promised emergence of XML, a streamlined version of SGML that will easily deliver SGML documents on the World Wide Web, the yoking of humanities research with electronic delivery through SGML will no doubt continue to increase. But how can individual humanists with one or two research assistants at hand encode the documents of their discipline for this type of delivery? A key component in such work is the SGML editor, a tool that intelligently interacts with an SGML DTD allowing data entry and valid tagging to occur in an easy-to-use word processing environment. Any humanities project using SGML should invest proper time and research into selecting an editor, for it is this tool that will be painstakingly used by novices and experts alike in an effort to make simple text files valid SGML document instances. Author/Editor with its companion software Rules Builder first appeared on the market in 1988 (Macintosh version) with Windows and Unix versions following in 1991. Put out by the Canadian company, SoftQuad Inc., Author/Editor is one of the early pioneers in SGML editing software; as such, it has set many of the standards for what an SGML editor can and should do. Academics doing a significant amount of work with SGML would do well to pay serious attention to this tool when selecting an editor for their research environment. Although not the cheapest editor on the market, its academic price makes it reasonable for projects and individuals who plan to invest a reasonable amount of time developing SGML documents. Individual researchers who plan to tag only a small handful of documents using pre-existing DTDs, however, might find cheaper or free editors to meet the task at hand. Rules Builder The primary function of Rules Builder is to compile an SGML DTD into an efficient binary file that then interacts with Author/Editor. During its compilation process Rules Builder will report ambiguous content models and elements declared but not used; while useful, such reporting does not substitute for the thorough parsing of a DTD which can be carried out more expertly with freeware tools such as SGMLS. In addition to compiling DTDs, Rules Builder functions as a simple text editor, permitting the editing of SGML DTDs, declarations, or entity reference files in preparation for compilation. Rules Builder will allow you to record and run simple macros to help ease the process of performing routine editing tasks on raw SGML.
Susan Fisher is the SGML Developer and Implementor for the Orlando Project: An Integrated History of Women's Writing in the British Isles. Copyright © 1997 Susan R. Fisher. All rights reserved. |
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Publisher: Price: Academic users can purchase the CAMPUS KIT which includes Author/Editor and Rules Builder plus Panorama (an SGML Browser that works as a helper application in conjunction with major Web Browsers) and Support for Universities, Colleges and other not-for-profit institutions. Cost is $395 U.S. or $525 CDN. Distribution Medium: 2 X 3.5" floppy disks (Rules Builder) System Requirements: 486 with 8 MB RAM Test Systems: Note: these programs are also available for Macintosh and Unix, but these versions are not reviewed here. Screen Captures:
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