The latest <oXygen/> XML Author sets new standards among content authoring tools, introducing many friendly authoring features and providing an easy-to-use interface. Taking advantage of XML technologies has never been easier. With <oXygen/> you have access to XML based standard frameworks, preset transformation scenarios and unmatched extensibility and connectivity.

The <oXygen/> WYSIWYG Author component can also be integrated into a web application as a Java Applet (more details and demo) using the <oXygen/> XML Editor Authoring SDK.

Why choose <oXygen/> XML Author?

You get almost all the XML related features available in <oXygen/> XML Editor at a lower price. The price starts from only $349 for a professional user license.

<oXygen/> XML Author is derived from the <oXygen/> XML Editor IDE, its main features focusing on CSS visual XML editing and XML source editing. Other features include:

• Remote Editing over FTP, HTTP/WebDAV and HTTPS/WebDAV

  Documents can be stored on WebDAV or FTP servers. Using <oXygen/> XML Author you can browse the content of the repositories, load and save the documents.

• Database support

  Using the Database perspective you can browse tables or collections from databases, inspect or modify data, specify XML Schemas for the XML fields and collections.

• Subversion (SVN) Client

  <oXygen/> XML Author makes easier the document sharing between content authors by including a Apache Subversion^TM (SVN) client. The SVN client allows you to browse repositories, check for changes, commit changes, update your working copy and examine the revision history.

• Files and Directories comparison tools

  A complete diff and merge solution is available in <oXygen/> XML Author. It offers both directory and file comparison, six different diff algorithms and multiple levels of comparison.

• XML Digital Signature and XML Canonicalization

  The digital signature is a requirement when exchanging information in an untrusted network. Since XML is used for content storage it is important to be able to sign the XML files or messages.

• XPath support

  XPath is a language for addressing specific parts of an XML document. XPath, like the Document Object Model (DOM), models an XML document as a tree of nodes. An XPath expression is a mechanism for navigating through and selecting nodes from the XML document. You can execute XPath queries on opened documents. Both XPath versions 1.0 and 2.0 are supported.

• Microsoft^® Office 2007 - Office Open XML (OOXML)

  <oXygen/> XML Author offers support for editing, transforming and validating documents composing the Office Open XML (OOXML) package directly through the archive support. This support is also available for other zipped files.

• Open Document Format (ODF)

  <oXygen/> XML Author allows you to extract, validate, edit and process the XML data stored in OpenDocument files and any other ZIP-based archive. These capabilities allow developers to use data from ODF documents together with validation and transformations (using XSLT or XQuery) to other file formats.

<oXygen/> XML Author Frameworks

The main frameworks available in <oXygen/> XML Author are:

• DocBook WYSIWYG Editor

  <oXygen/> XML Author comes with the DocBook DTDs and XSL stylesheets for generating HTML and Formatting Objects files. Writing a document in DocBook and publishing it is now a simple task.

• DITA WYSIWYG Editor

  <oXygen/> XML Author allows the users with less knowledge of XML to edit DITA documents in a similar way to a regular text processing application. The DITA Open Toolkit is included in the standard <oXygen/> XML Author distribution allowing publishing of DITA Maps to different output formats.

• TEI WYSIWYG Editor

  <oXygen/> XML Author comes with the TEI DTDs and stylesheets. Just as with the DocBook framework writing and publishing a TEI document is very easy.

• XHTML WYSIWYG Editor

  <oXygen/> XML Author includes schemas, catalogs and templates for XHTML. You can create documents conforming either to transitional or strict XHTML DTDs.

The Best Visual Editing Experience

<oXygen/> uses a number of information sources (like the document structure defined by the schema, the CSS used for rendering, etc.) to provide the best editing experience when you edit visually so that you can get intuitive results for your editing actions.

<oXygen/> lets you be in control of your document, it provides location feedback and requires understanding only two basic editing concepts:

• You know where you are!

  There are many non-intrusive indicators that mark and inform you about the current position in the document: location tooltips, current element highlight, current element range, breadcrumb showing the location path, synchronized outline with position markers.

• Type to enter content

  To add content, just go to the position you want to insert content and type it there.

• Press Enter for markup

  To enter markup (elements, comments, processing instructions) just go to the position you want and press Enter. <oXygen/> will show you what options are available and will help you to quickly choose one of them. If you want to wrap some content in an element, just select that and press Enter to choose the element. In addition to the available XML elements, <oXygen/> shows also the user defined XML templates (snippets).

The schema information is used to guide you to enter valid markup, to check if the editing operations results do not violate the schema constraints and also to modify dynamically the editing actions according with the constrains from the schema while keeping their results intuitive, avoiding as much as possible creating invalid content.

<oXygen/> uses the CSS information to react specifically if you edit in a block element, in an inline or in an element space where the whitespace should be preserved.

The user editing experience can be further improved for a specific grammar (framework) by using the open API available in the oXygen Author SDK to contribute framework specific actions or editing behaviour. The default DITA, DocBook, TEI, XHTML, etc. support that comes with oXygen is just an example of using this open API and the customizations are available together with the source code as part of the Author SDK.

Advanced Editing Features

• Change Tracking

  Change Tracking is a way to keep a history of the changes made to a document. When change tracking is enabled, the inserted and deleted content is highlighted in the document allowing you to easily identify the affected regions. Also, tracked changes can be rendered in callouts (balloons) displayed at the side of the document, with connecting lines pointing to the changed content.

• Content Annotations/Comments

  When you annotate your XML documents, the comments are displayed in the Author view as side callouts (balloons) showing also additional information like the author and the comment time.

• Profiling/Conditional Text for Any XML Document

  Conditional text is a way to mark blocks of text meant to appear in some renditions of the document but not in others. For instance you can mark a section of a document to be included in the manual designated for the 'expert' users, other for the 'novice' users manual while unmarked sections are included in any rendition.

You can download <oXygen/> XML Author and try it for 30 days.