(This is with Indigo Service Release 2 and Vex 1.1.0.M1_201301292035 running on Windows 7)
I've volunteered to help edit a pre-existing open source eBook written in DocBook. I installed the latest Vex and I'm able to bring up a window with an xml file rendered correctly. However, when I try to change anything in the document, I get a message saying that the editor is read-only. I don't understand this. It isn't an OS file permission problem because I can edit the file and write it back using vim just fine. It's not a basic Eclipse problem because I can change other non-XML files in the same directory.
Did you by chance opened your document using 'Open File...' from the menu?
In this case, the document is read only to eclipse. You have to create a new Eclipse project and drag your file to this project to be able to modify the document.
Creating a new Eclipse project and then dragging my file into the project indeed solved the read-only problem. Doing this was trickier than it sounded, though, but
I got it to work. Thanks for the suggestion.
However, I discovered another much more serious problem. The XML file I'm editing came from a Git repo that I cloned. After doing some editing of the XML file, I compared the edited file with the original file in the Git repo. To my shock, Vex had completely reformatted the text in the file I had been editing. The text was still correct XML and rendered the same as the original file but running diff on it and the original file showed many differences that were caused by this reformatting, and not the editing I had been doing.
Is there any way to have Vex only change what I explicitly modify, and nothing
else?
Is there any way to have Vex only change what I explicitly modify, and nothing
else?
No there is no way to do this, as VEX rewrites the document from an internal content model. You may try to change output formatting in 'Preferences -> VEX' to match the formatting of the source document.