10 What About Software?

Documents created using the tag set described here can be created:

using an SGML-aware editor such as SoftQuad's Author/Editor, or ArborText's Adept, or DataLogic's EditStation, or the public-domain editor emacs, for which a specialized mode for SGML editing has been constructed (psgml.el). (If you use emacs, you will find psgml.el at the usual sources of emacs material. The other programs are available from their vendors.)
using a standard editor or word processor, typing in the angle brackets, etc. as you see them in the examples here; working this way requires that you save the file in `ASCII' or `non-document' mode; otherwise, the proprietary markup of your word processor will get in the way.
using a standard word processor with an add-on tool to translate documents from that word processor's native format into SGML

Of these, the first and third are most convenient for most users, and the first and second are most likely to produce valid SGML. The main difficulty with the third method is that mechanical translation from a word processor into SGML is usually possible only for very restricted SGML tag sets, and is only reliable if the documents have been created with an unusually disciplined use of the word processor's style-sheet facility. Any user interested enough in SGML to exercise the necessary discipline would probably do better with a full-fledged SGML editor.

Once created, SGML documents can be processed with a variety of commercial and public-domain tools. No complete listing is possible here; at the time this is written, the most convenient summary of SGML software is the Whirlwind Guide to SGML Tools maintained by Steve Pepper of Oslo, and available on the internet by ftp at ftp.uio.no (if you don't know about ftp, or this whole paragraph appears to be technobabble, consult your local computer center, or one of the numerous recent guides to the Internet for users who lack local computer center support). The most popular public-domain tool is the parser sgmls, written by James Clark on the basis of materials written by Charles Goldfarb. Using sgmls to process SGML documents commonly involves writing programs to read its standard output format, but it can also be used by non-programmers to check the validity of their SGML documents. (If you want to do this, check the TEI file servers for DOS batch files, Unix shell scripts, or the equivalent for your system, which simplify the task of setting up sgmls and running it as a validator. If you run into difficulties, issue a call for help on TEI-L.) An increasing number of SGML tools also use sgmls as a pre-processor, so acquiring a copy of sgmls makes sense even for those who have no intention of writing programs on their own.