[tlug] TEI-Emacs NG

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

BoTI's (accurate) mention yesterday of the fact of my computing habitat being the
Kitchen Sink known as Emacs reminded me to mention something that Emacs
users might be interested in.

The Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) has for some time
now maintained a very powerful add-on for Emacs users who use Emacs for
their XML work, called TEI-Emacs. It is a full featured XML editor that
is, without a doubt, equal to or better than any commercial package on
the market. Part of the reason for this is the fact that people like
Norman Walsh and James Clark are Emacs users, and they regularly
collaborate in adapting their latest parsers and other tools for
Emacs. These are in turn refined by TEI specialists like Christian
Wittern and Sebastian Rahtz (Debian guys), who enhance the Unicode
multilingual fontification support, XSL output, and some of the other
tools.

Up until recently, TEI-Emacs has been using PSGML, which was a slow
memory hog. This has now been replaced by James Clark's new
NXML package, which is very fast, and can work with huge files.

So for anyone who wants at the least to enhance their Emacs Unicode
support, but also does a bit of XML here and there, this might be worth
checking out. No matter what, I think this package is a superb example
of the possibilities of open source-type collaboration, in the extent to
which this package is more than competitive with the best of the
commercial XML tools.

I include Sebastian's announcement from the TEI list in full below (when
he mentions "bleeding edge" he is talking mostly about a lack of
documentation, rather than any serious stability problems).-- Chuck

> I have reworked aspects of the TEI Emacs bundle, and re-released it. See
> http://www.tei-c.org/Software/tei-emacs for details. Apart from updating
> things like the Docbook DTD/XSL, and updating the TEI XSLT stylesheets
> bundled, the main change is defaulting to use James Clark's new "nxml"
> mode for  Emacs. This is under very active development, so do not
> upgrade your tei-emacs unless you want to live rather on the bleeding
> edge. However, it is a nice bleeding edge...
> 
> The main features of nxml mode are:
> 
>  - it uses a Relax NG schema to direct your editing and validate your
> work
>  - it does continuous incremental validation while you are not typing
>  - it does emacs completion of element and attribute names
> 
> I have provided Relax NG versions of TEI P4, and a default setup
> which eventually uses TEI Lite if it cannot locate anything better. Some
> standardized TEI skeletons are a menu option away for when you start a
> new file.
> 
> The old psgml xml-mode is still available.
> 
> I am, of course, happy to discuss details of the tei emacs setup
> on this list as much as needed! however, for detailed discussion of
> nxml-mode, join its own discussion list.
> 
> Sebastian Rahtz
> <sebastian.rahtz@example.com>

---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@example.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary [http://www.acmuller.net]
H-Buddhism List Editor [http://www.h-net.org/~buddhism/]
Mobile Phone: 090-9310-1787