Hi have been producing lots of DocBook text using the free Serna 4.1 editor.
Serna 4.1 is a great application - DocBook editing with WYSIWYM (... What You Mean) feedback which is much easier (and faster) to use than editing the raw XML and then generating the output to see what you are doing. Most of the time Serna does exactly what I want, and most of the time it is quite fast. Quite recently Serna decided to open source the free edition, and they are currently in the process of setting this up. Right now there is for instance no issue tracking system available, and what I am about to write about should really go into such a system (and it will as soon as they have set something up).
Anyway, here are some quite annoying things with Serna 4.1:
Paste pastes an old value (or nothing at all)
I think I have tracked this down to Serna not being able to paste clipboard content in certain formats. Pasting it in an intermediate container, and then changing it to a simpler text format helps. Using Paste as Text in Serna does not help - so something is probably wrong with how the clipboard contents gets parsed. Anyway - sometimes it is really difficult to tell which version got pasted. My solution now is to use a clipboard manager that can strip styling from the current content on the clipboard.
Frequent crashes.
Serna 4.1 crashes quite frequently, I have used it constantly for about three weeks now and there is at least one crash every day. Sometimes the user interface locks up, it is not possible to activate the window, and the menus does not appear. A Force Quit is the only option in these situations.
Confused "reload logic"
When explicitly asking Serna to reload a document it may trigger Serna’s automatic check for reload and it prompts with "the document has changed, do you want to download" - selecting "yes" in this case will cause Serna to crash (almost every time) - you get around the issue by instead selecting "ignore" (which works since you asked for a reload in the first place). My suspicion is that this happens because Serna closes the document to reload, and if the document that then (temporarily) becomes active includes a document that changed, the extra prompt will appear.
Pasting into ProgramListing and LiteralLayout drops end of line
Pasting text where line breaks should be preserved is a mystery. It sometimes work to use Serna’s "Edit as Text" and then pasting it there, but a lot of the time, the line ending are lost. I have a suspicion that this happens when there is something screwy going on with the clipboard format. Using Edit as Text does not work well when the text is XML (or contains special characters). Pasting it directly into the document editor has the advantage of getting transformation into > etc. The only way around this is to edit the examples first using Eclipse.
