SoftQuad Author/Editor 4 due this fall

July 20, 1997

The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems
Vol. 26, No. 19

SoftQuad announced Author/Editor 4.0, due in October. It is amazing how the same interface that looked user-friendly a few years ago (You could hide the SGML tags! Create a style sheet! Print!) had lost its luster in comparison with HTML editors, SoftQuad's HotMetal among them. All this should change with the new release, which will include many features that mimic what has been done for HTML. These announced features include:

• Panorama for document preview.
• A common style sheet for Panorama and A/E.
• Save as SGML instead of Export to SGML.
• Support for the SGML Open entity management catalog.
• Inline view of external entities.

At the same time, we were able to learn more of SoftQuad's plans for HIP (HotMetal Intranet Publisher) 2.0. This product, initially announced last September, will include XML-compliant authoring and a document fragmenter working with popular search engines. The engine will search across a collection, and then the fragmenter will chop up the document for batch downloading to Panorama or immediate conversion to HTML. To a user, it will display a table of contents and a hit list. When the user scrolls or links to another section, subsequent fragments will be retrieved as if they were already local. Users will define the level at which the documents should be fragmented.