The Author mode editor of Oxygen XML Editor was designed to provide a friendly user-interface for editing XML documents. Author combines the power of source editing with the intuitive interface of a word processor. You can customize the Author mode editor to support new custom XML formats or to change how standard XML formats are edited.
Figure: Oxygen XML Editor Author Visual Editor
Although Oxygen XML Editor comes with already configured frameworks for DocBook, DITA, TEI, and XHTML you might need to create a customization of the editor to handle other types of documents. A common use case is when your organization holds a collection of XML document types used to define the structure of internal documents and they need to be visually edited by people with no experience working with XML files.
There are several ways to customize the editor:
- Create a CSS file defining styles for the XML elements the user will work with, and create XML files that reference the CSS through an xml-stylesheet processing instruction.
- Fully configure a document type association. This involves putting together the CSS stylesheets, XML schemas, actions, menus, bundling them, and distributing an archive. The CSS and GUI elements are settings for the Oxygen XML Editor Author mode. The other settings such as the templates, catalogs, and transformation scenarios are general settings and are enabled whenever the association is active, regardless of the editing mode (Text, Grid, or Author).