Can you suggest a free XML Editor compatible with H&M?

[Ivonne Alemany]

Hi Tim - We have purchased 5 Professional (named) licenses and we have a need for our content editors working from a different location to access XML files to perform their edits. We'd like to find a way to use a free/open source WYSIWYG XML editor that supports H&M stylesheets to solve this issue. We are using Subversion for version control for all our H&M projects. Our content editors can access SVN. Can you suggest a viable solution? What stylesheets would be applied to the free XML editor to accomplish this? Thoughts?
Thank you,

[Tim Green]

Hi Ivonne,

You can edit Help & Manual source code with any XML editor because the projects are 100% plain text XML files. You just need to store in the uncompressed XML/HMPX format. However, using an XML editor to "perform their edits" is not a good idea! Don't even consider it for a second. You would be very, very unhappy if you tried. Anyone who tries this will always damage the XML code and then you will waste countless hours trying to locate and fix the errors.

Anyone who wants to edit Help & Manual projects must have Help & Manual, there is no way around that. Using an XML editor might seem to be a way to save money, but it isn't. Good XML editors cost much more than Help & Manual anyway, and even then you would still spend much, much more on that solution (even with a free XML editor) because of all the time you would waste. XML source code editing on HM projects is only something you should do occasionally, when you need to make specific specialized changes that are not possible in the HM editor. And even then it needs to be done with extreme caution, with backups and a good knowledge of the XML code.

If you wish to do multi-user editing remotely and offline (users in different locations, also needing to edit without a network connection) you need to store a copy of your project in a Subversion (SVN) version control system, which is actively supported by Help & Manual 6 Pro and Server editions. Then each user works on a linked copy of the project on their own computers, which they synchronize via the SVN server. This provides all the advantages of direct remote editing, but each author is still working on their own local (but linked) copy rather than directly via an Internet connection.

Note that the remote authors will need their own copies of Help & Manual on their own computers to do this. If they are on the go that means they need Help & Manual Professional, because the server version is for LAN only. Alternatively they could be using the server version on the LAN in their own office but working on a shared SVN project with that.

SVN is an open-source system and all the components you need for it are completely free. It gives you the advantage that your remote authors can work on their projects offline. They only need to connect to the copy on your server to synchronize their work with the master copy. Before starting work they open the project and select "Synchronize SVN" in the Help & Manual toolbar to update their local copy with any new changes that other authors have made in the meantime. Then when they have finished their session they select Synchronize SVN again to merge their own changes with your master copy.

This works even if two people have worked on the same topics. If they have edited different parts of the topics the changes are just merged silently, because there are no conflicts. If they have both edited the same text you get a dialog asking you which versions of each change you want to keep ("mine" or "theirs"). Agreements between team members on which topics to work on can keep these conflicts to a minimum.

Once you have stored your project in your version control repository, which can also be made available online, each author downloads a local working copy of the project from the repository. This working copy is what they edit, but it remains linked to the "master" copy in the repository. Only changes need to be transferred in either direction, which means that once each author has their own local copy of the project only very small amounts of data need to be transferred when they synchronize their work with the master copy. This makes the solution extremely efficient and also very robust -- you have none of the data integrity and speed nightmares involved in live editing via an open connection.

For information on setting up and using Help & Manual with SVN please see this chapter in the HM help:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... cs_svn.htm