I’ve been toying with XMetaL on Linux and Wine, with varying degrees of success. It’s quite obvious that the XMetaL/Wine/Linux combo isn’t ready for prime time just yet, but it’s so close.

I’ve had some interesting problems along the way, most importantly that the Save As function isn’t reliable. Or rather, it doesn’t work with relative paths. If you want to save a file, but only enter a filename in the dialog, XMetaL says things like “File is read-only” or “File doesn’t exist”. A little investigating shows that the save component is unable to fill in the correct path to the file, and therefore cannot find the location. This problem is cured by entering a Windows-like path to the file, for example, D:myfile.xml. (Note that your home directory is D: in Wine.)

The absolute path problem can be a character encoding problem (for example, the save component could very well use some weird Windows keymap scheme instead of pure Unicode; XMetaL is supposed to run on Windows 98, an OS not known for its Unicode capabilities) but there are other variables in the equation, too. For one, I suspect that Wine’s file path translation also matters.

A lesser, but still annoying, problem is that a saved XMetaL window size (when starting the application) doesn’t work at all if you’ve set Wine to Windows 98 mode. It works more often in Windows 2000 or XP modes, but not every time, which I don’t understand at all. Also, XMetaL forgets the view mode (tag view, normal view, etc), for some reason, not necessarily the same.

On the other hand, I’ve successfully been able to use (most parts of) X4, an XMetaL authoring environment that we developed at Information & Media a few years ago. This is good news since while I can live with writing in OpenOffice, it doesn’t beat a real XML editor with a decent authoring DTD and environment.

I expect that Wine 1.0, when out, can solve some of the current problems. I’ll keep you posted.