Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

My travails with XML editing are not new. So, this time when I had to convert a fairly good size MS-WORD document into an XML document as per the DTD used by W3C specifications, I did another Google search for an appropriate tool.

Came across XEE from XMLMind. Looked promising at the high level, but failed miserably at what I wanted to do. Apparently it works only with CSS and not with XSL styles documents. And my document used an XSL stylesheet to transform the input document into XHTML.

What I was really looking for was the ability to select a piece of text and then place this text within a specified start and end element tag -- all with minimum number of key-strokes. Assuming a tag word of 8 characters, an explicit typing was taking (1+8+1+2+8+1=)21 keystrokes. With cut-n-paste, I was able to reduce it to 4 plus signficant mouse movements. This was okay but not what I was looking for.

I started looking at the help topics of my favourite editor TextPad and found that it has the capability of maintaining user defined book clippings. This capability allows defining short cuts to place any kind of scaffolding around a selected text. This is what I was looking for.

I created a clippings book for my commonly used tags and now can place a pair of tags with just 2 key-strokes! Not only this, I have the complete list of tags in front of my eyes.