Installing Emacs

Most Unix systems come with emacs already installed. Most Microsoft Windows systems do not. A precompiled version for Windows is available from the Gnu ftp site here. (If you are on a Unix system that does not have emacs installed you will have to compile it yourself, sorry!) Extract the files using a program such as WinZip and install them somewhere. A good place on Windows would be C:\Program Files.

Installing PSGML

The next step is to ensure that you have PSGML installed on your system. PSGML is a special SGML/XML editing mode for Emacs, written by Lennart Staflin. Again, many Unix systems have it installed already, but if yours does not, it is available online. If you installed your own emacs, extract the PSGML files in the site-lisp directory under your emacs installation.

Setting up an SGML catalog

Once you have PSGML installed, you need to setup an SGML catalog. This catalog provide the translation from public document types to physical file locations and allows emacs to use the tags from your specific language. For simplicity, Connexions has made available a catalog containing the CNXML, MathML, and QML DTDs. You can download this from our website. Just download this file and extract it somewhere on you computer. A good place on Unix might be /usr/local/share, or your home-directory. On Windows you can extract it to C:\. Remember where you extracted the files, because you will need this information in the next step.

Setting up your environment

Now that everything is installed, you must configure emacs. The first step is to tell emacs where your SGML catalog is. This is most easily done by setting the environment variable SGML_CATALOG_FILES to the location of your catalog. For example, if you extracted the catalog in the directory /usr/local/share, you would set SGML_CATALOG_FILES to /usr/local/share/sgml/catalog. On Unix this is done in your shell initialization file (.cshrc for C-shell users and .profile for Bourne shell users). On Win9X, setting variables can be done in your C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT file. On WinNT, Win2K, and WinXP this is done from the System item in the control panel.

You also need to add some instructions to your emacs initialization file. Download the xml.emacs file and append it to your emacs init file. On Unix, the emacs init file is named .emacs and resides in your home directory. On Windows, it is named _emacs and does not have a default location.

Simple editing with PSGML

Now you are ready to begin writing CNXML with emacs. See The Basic CNXML for an introduction to writing documents in CNXML. You must begin the document with the XML declaration and specifying the document type definition to use. For example, to begin a document using CNXML, type the following lines:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE document PUBLIC "-//CNX//DTD CNXML 0.5//EN" 
          "http://cnx.rice.edu/cnxml/0.5/DTD/cnxml_plain.dtd">
	

Once you have started the file out with this header you can begin adding markup elements.

Alternatively, to ensure that you have matched start and end tags with the appropriate attributes and children, you may insert an entire element at once. To do this, type C-c C-e (or select Insert Element from the menu) and type the name of the desired element. This will insert opening and closing tags for the element and prompt you for any required attributes. It will also insert any required child elements. Conversely, to delete an entire element with its children, type C-M-k.

There are many other commands that you may find useful. Explore the Markup and View menus to get a feel for the available commands. You may also want to look at the reference manual distributed with PSGML.