Blood, Sweat and Tiers

IntelliJ as.....Writing Tool!

Trying to collaborate on some technical writing with Simon Harris led us to figure out a way to get the type of collaboration we are used to while coding when we're writing. this means having the content in a textual format so it can be merged, ruling out MS Word and other binary formats. We've been using a wiki a lot for this recently, but reading Martin Fowler's post about writing using XML made us want to give it a try. Now before you say DocBook, let me just say that that's just a little tooooo heavyweight for our needs. But the idea is right. So we knocked up a little DTD that incorporates a hierarchy of sections, with figures, code listing, cross references, external references, etc, and then used IntelliJ IDEA's DTD-driven XML editing to start writing the content. With the code folding and a few live templates, we pretty quickly had a nice intuitive editing experience that allows the separation of the creation of the content from the marking up thereof. With the addition of a little XSLT that automatically numbers the nested sections, voila! IntelliJ as author's workbench! Cool!