[oXygen-user] No Framework for NLM?

[Wendell Piez]

Hi,

At 06:42 AM 9/29/2010, Eliot wrote:
>A place to share would be nice. I hacked a very quick framework out of a CSS
>lying about so at least I can get automatic in-editor formatting. I hadn't
>really appreciated how easy it is to set up a framework until I tried to do
>it.

I also have pieces lying around ... :-)

>I'm starting a client project that will involve managing NLM documents and
>will support light editing with Oxygen (essentially small editorial
>corrections to files produced by data conversion houses). I don't expect to
>need to do more than set up some basic buttons and CSS styles.

Since Eliot has Java-fu, he might want to do the buttons stuff, but I 
also have CSS he could use or adapt, which is reasonably complete for 
the Publishing or Authoring (although not Archiving) DTDs.

>As far as I can tell it's pretty rare for people to author directly in
>NLM--most journal workflows are non-XML with XML produced at the end from
>whatever the original source was.

That's largely true, especially since the tag set was originally 
designed to be a clean target for transformation from existing source 
data (much of it already in SGML or XML), not a production tag set as 
such. But it's perfectly useful for that purpose, especially if you 
bring the same sort of tagging discipline as you would to, say, 
Docbook or TEI. And there's more of that happening all the time.

So a journal publisher may start with NLM as an interchange format 
for materials submitting to Pubmed Central. But then they discover 
that investments made there can pay off further back in the document 
workflow. There are already some early movers using NLM variants 
behind production systems (some of them not small). This means there 
is opportunity for editing applications in this space, if not for 
much authoring as such (conversion vendors and applications will 
still have a role as long as word processors don't go away), then at 
least for copy editing and document QA.

While in comparison to, say, DITA (which serves the needs of a 
different sort of document production), the uptake of the NLM JATS 
("Journal Article Tag Set") will be slow, there's also no reason to 
think it won't also be steady and, eventually, strong.

Cheers,
Wendell


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