Chapter 4.  Editing documents

Table of Contents

Working with Unicode
Opening and closing documents
Creating new documents
Saving documents
Opening existing documents
Closing documents
Creating and sharing new document templates
Viewing file properties
Editing XML documents
Associate a schema to a document
Streamline with Tag-Insight
Debugging XML documents
Document navigation
Grouping documents in XML projects
Including document parts with XInclude
Working with XML Catalogs
Converting between schema languages
Generating HTML documentation for a XML Schema
Formatting and Indenting Documents (Pretty Print)
Schema diagram
Introduction
XML Schema diagram
Relax NG schema diagram
XML editor specific actions
Select actions
Source actions
XML document actions
XML Refactoring actions
Text editor specific actions
Undoing and redoing user actions
Copying and pasting text
Using Check Spelling

Working with Unicode

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Unicode is an internationally recognized standard, adopted by industry leaders. The Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646.

It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends. Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets.

As a modern XML Editor, <oXygen/> provides support for the Unicode standard enabling your XML application to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. Internally, the <oXygen/> XML Editor uses 16bit characters covering the Unicode Character set.

On loading documents of the type XML, XSL, XSD and DTD, <oXygen/> reads the document prolog to determine the specified encoding type. This is then used to instruct the Java Encoder to load support for and save using the code chart specified.

While in most cases you will use UTF-8, simply changing the encoding name will cause the file to be saved using the new encoding. The appendix Unicode Character Encoding provides a Matrix that matches common names with Java Names. It also explains what you should type in the XML prolog to cause the document to be saved as the required encoding.

To edit document written in Japanese or Chinese, you will need to change the font to one that supports the specific characters (a Unicode font). For the Windows platform, use of Arial Unicode MS or MS Gothic is recommended. Do not expect Wordpad or Notepad to handle these encodings. Use Explorer or Word to eventually examine XML documents.

Note

The naming convention used under Java does not always correspond to the common names used by the Unicode standard. For instance, while in XML you will use encoding="UTF-8", in Java the same encoding has the name "UTF8".