IVR

Syntext, Inc, a private company founded in Seattle, Washington in 1999, reportedly has unveiled a free edition of its “WYSIWYG” XML editor for students and open source developers who work with DITA, DocBook, and other popular XML formats.

 

Serna Free is available for all major platforms such as Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows (2000, XP, Vista), Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC, according to the company, and inherits all the essential features that authors with virtually no XML experience need to start working with structured content in a familiar environment that looks much like a conventional word processor.

 

The company claims that Serna, the world’s first WYSIWYG XML editor to incorporate on-the-fly XSL-driven technology for flexible presentations, profiling, and renderings of composite XML documents, is most useful for topic-oriented authoring with DITA because Serna may present documents consisting of a multitude of small topics and links in a single, transparent view.

 

Additional features include: on-the-fly document validation against XML Schemas; entity and XInclude in-place editing; drag-and-drop with on-the-fly validation; UNICODE support; and multilingual spell-checking.

 

It has a simple and user-friendly interface localized into several languages and is fully configurable. Users can even customize the interface for a specific document format.

 

“The Free Edition not only offers a professional-level tool to a broad audience, but it also allows individual and corporate users to freely exchange XML documents to browse, modify and publish them using a truly free tool,” says Paul Antonov, Syntext’s chief executive officer.

 

“This becomes especially important with the increasingly widespread acceptance of DITA as a standard of choice for technical documentation and help systems,” Antonov added.

 

Authors also have an option to upgrade their Serna Free to the Enterprise Edition, which enables enterprise-oriented features such as integration with content management systems, collaborative authoring, and powerful customization APIs and tools.