Author Developer Guide

The Author editor of Oxygen XML Author was designed to bridge the gap between the XML source editing and a friendly user interface. The main achievement is the fact that the Author combines the power of source editing with the intuitive interface of a text editor.

This guide is targeted at advanced authors who want to customize the Author editing environment and is included both as a chapter in the Oxygen XML Author user manual and as a separate document in the Author SDK.

Oxygen XML Author Visual Editor

Although Oxygen XML Author comes with already configured frameworks for DocBook, DITA, TEI, XHTML, you might need to create a customization of the editor to handle other types of documents. The 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 in working with XML files.

There are several ways to customize the editor:

  1. Create a CSS file defining styles for the XML elements the user will work with, and create XML files that refer the CSS through an xml-stylesheet processing instruction.
  2. Fully configure a document type association. This involves putting together the CSSs, the XML schemes, actions, menus, etc, bundling them and distributing an archive. The CSS and the GUI elements are settings of the Oxygen XML Author. The other settings like the templates, catalogs, transformation scenarios are general settings and are enabled whenever the association is active, no matter the editing mode (Text, Grid or Author).

Both approaches will be discussed in the following sections.