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Quanta

Quanta is a friendly editor for SGML and XML documents. Quanta features syntax highlighting, autocompletion, autoclosing and code folding for DocBook tags, easy access for the KDE documentation tools, meinproc and checkXML.

A screenshot of Quanta's main window

A screenshot of Quanta's main window

Some of the tools available for DocBook editing are the document structure sidebar, tag editor sidebar and, starting with Quanta 3.4 (which is part of KDE 3.4), Quanta offers a DocBook toolbar, complete with table and list wizards, ui elements, admonitions, KDE tools and other standard tags. While Quanta offers a visual page editor for html and xhtml pages, there is no support yet for DocBook visual editing. We highlight here some of these features.

DocBook Toolbars

The DocBook toobars offer easy access to the most common DocBook tags, plus the list, table and image wizards. You can check your DocBook document using the checkXML button from the Tools toolbar: the output of the script will be displayed in he Messages sidebar, in the bottom of Quanta's main window. If there is no output, that usually means no errors. To process the DocBook into html files, use the meinproc button on the same toolbar.

Note

Depending on the version of some XML utilities used by Quanta, the checkXML and meinproc scripts can present bugs. Starting from the upcoming KDE 3.4.2 release, these bugs will not exist anymore. But until there, if you experience these bugs, (in special if Konqueror is not starting up when using the meinproc script or there is no output when using the checkXML script, you can get and install the updated docbook scripts from kde-files.org to solve these issues.

A screenshot of Quanta's DocBook toolbar

A screenshot of Quanta's DocBook toolbar

Tag Editor

The tag or attributes editor is located on the right sidebar, and it shows the available attributes for the tag which is currently being edited. The tag editor helps you to edit the attributes for the current tag: just click on the Value column of any attribute to edit it.

A screenshot of Quanta's attribute editor sidebar

A screenshot of Quanta's attribute editor sidebar

Documentation Sidebar

Another useful feature is the documentation sidebar, which allows you to download and use documentation packages as offline reference. This guide is also available offline, using Quanta's documentation sidebar. Just grab and install the KDE Doc Primer documentation package. The documentation sidebar is on the right side of the main window.

A screenshot of Quanta's documentation sidebar

A screenshot of Quanta's documentation sidebar, showing the KDE Doc Primer

Entities Autocompletion

Quanta offers autocompletion for entities. However, this feature is hardly useful without the KDE entities definitions. To generate the entities list for the KDE, follow the procedure below:

Note

The autocompletion feature still has some bugs in the 3.4.1 release. These bugs are fixed, and will be available starting from the 3.4.2 release.

Procedure 4.3. Generating and installing the entities.tag file

  1. Open Quanta. Choose the DTD->Load & Convert DTD menu item.

  2. Now, we have to select the right dtd file to convert. On the dialog, select the KDE installation folder (usually /usr or /opt/kde3. If you cannot find it, type 

    $kde-config --prefix
    on a terminal application. The dtd file we want is named kdex.dtd under share/apps/ksgmltools2/customization/dtd/. Select it and press OK. A new Document Type Editing Package (DTEP) for kdex will be created.

  3. Now that you have converted the dtd, you can either use it directly, by choosing the DTD->Change the DTD... and selecting the kdex dtd. But the best solution is to install the entities.tag file for automatic use with the KDE docbook dtds.

  4. Now, let's copy the file from the kdex dtep to the kde-docbook dtep. You can use a console application or a file manager to perform this action. These locations are under the KDEHOME folder, the folder that contains your KDE settings and application data, usually, ~/.kde. If you cannot find it, type 

    $kde-config --localprefix
    on a terminal application. The dtep folder is under KDEHOME/share/apps/quanta/dtep. The simplest way to do copy it is using a terminal application (e.g. Konsole).

  5. Start a console application and enter the command: 

    $cp `kde-config --localprefix`/share/apps/quanta/dtep/kdex/entities.tag `kde-config \
--localprefix`/share/apps/quanta/dtep/kde-docbook-4.1.2/entities.tag

  6. Restart Quanta.

A screenshot of Quanta's entities auto-completion feature

A screenshot of Quanta's entities auto-completion feature

Document Structure

finally, the document structure displays the logical representation of your document. By left mouse button clicking on an element, your cursor will taken to the element's position in the document. By right mouse button clicking on an element, you are presented with a number of actions that deal with navigating and updating the tree.

A screenshot of Quanta's document structure sidebar

A screenshot of Quanta's document structure sidebar

Quanta is part of the kdewebdev module, which is released as part of KDE. Binary packages are available for the majority of the distributions. Quanta can be easily extended to support custom scripts, toolbars and documentation sidebars. For more information, check the application handbook.