OOo has been tested by LDP volunteers with mostly positive results. Thanks to Charles Curley (charlescurley.com) for the following notes on using OOo version 1.0.x:

Conclusions: OOo 1.1RC is worth looking at if you want a word processor for preparing DocBook documents.

However, I hope they cure the lack of documentation. For one thing, it would be nice to know which native OOo styles map to which DocBook elements. It would also be nice to know how to map one's own OOo styles to DocBook elements.

Tabatha Marshall offers the following additional information for OOo 1.1.

If you have installed a recent distribution, you may already have PSGML installed for use with Emacs. To check, start Emacs and look for the PSGML documentation (C+himpsgml).

If you want GNU Emacs to enter PSGML mode when you open an .xml file, it will need to be able to find the DocBook DTD files. If your distribution already had PSGML set up for use with GNU Emacs, you probably won't need to do anything.

Once you've configured your system to use PSGML you will need to override Emacs' default sgml-mode with the psgml-mode. This can be done by configuring your .emacs file. After you've edited the configuration file you will need to restart Emacs.

There are a number of steps to creating a new DocBook XML file in Emacs.

Emacs can be configured to use aspell by adding the following to your ~/.emacs file. Thanks to Rob Weir for this configuration information.

;; Use aspell
(setq-default ispell-program-name "aspell")
;;Setup some dictionary languages
(setq ispell-dictionary "british")
(setq flyspell-default-dictionary "british")

When you open your DocBook file, nedit should already have syntax highlighting enabled. If it does not you can turn it on explicitly using: Preferences → Language Mode → SGML HTML

If you have line numbers turned on (using Preferences → Show Line Numbers) then finding validation errors is much simpler. nsgmls, the validation tool we'll use, lists errors by their line number.

Since you can feed the contents of your window to outside programs, you can easily extend nedit to perform repetitive functions. The example you'll see here is to validate your document using nsgmls. For more information about nsgmls and validating documents please read Section 3, “Validation”.

Figure B.2. Adding shell commands to nedit

Figure B.3. nsgmls output on success

There are many versions of vi. New authors will likely want one of the more feature-packed versions for syntax highlighting and a graphical interface including mouse control.

Red Hat users will want the following packages: vim-common, vim-minimal and vim-enhanced. Debian users will want the following package: vim. For an X interface (including GUI menus and mouse control) users will want gvim. The “g” in gvim is for “Graphical”.

VIM compiles very easy should you need to build your own. Both vim and gvim are built by default. Syntax highlighting is included but not enabled by default if you have to start from scratch; use the :syntax enable command in VIM to turn this feature on.

In both vim and gvim, .xml files will be recognized and enter into “SGML mode”. A series of known DocBook tags and attributes have been entered into vim and will be highlighted one color if the name is known and another if it is not (for this author the colors are yellow and blue).

Having the correct document type declaration at the top of your document should add the syntax highlighting. If you do not see this highlighting you will need to force VIM into SGML mode (even for XML files) using the command :set ft=sgml. If you are working with multiple files for a single XML document you can add your document type in <-- comments --> to the top of the file to get the correct syntax highlighting (you will need to restart the program to see the change in highlighting). The top line of this file (tools-text-editors.xml) looks like this:

 
<!-- <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC '-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN'> -->

As in Emacs, Vim, will work quite happily with aspell. It can be run from within Vim with the following: :! aspell -c %.

For more sophisticated spell check alternatives, give Cream or vimspell a try.

The following information is provided by Kwan Lowe.

Vim has a DocBook helper script which can be easily copied into your .vimscripts directory and used to “auto complete” tags while writing DocBook documents. The script can be downloaded from: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=38.