It did a few things rather well and was decidedly minimalistic a little too minimalistic, maybe. Quite a few years ago, I used XML Copy Editor for teaching XML. Another motivation has been that oXygen is actually rather more daunting, complex and feature-packed than what we need, whether in smaller editing projects or when teaching the fundamentals of XML markup. And this is the motivation that has driven me to find a suitable replacement for oXygen when dealing with XML-TEI files in the Digital Humanities. This is one of the reasons why we recommend and teach Zotero rather than Citavi, when it comes to bibliographical reference managers, despite the fact that my university has a campus licence for Citavi. In teaching contexts, in particular, I don’t like to recommend and teach tools that students won’t be able to install on as many devices as they care to, and more importantly, tools that students won’t be able to continue using for free once they leave the university. (And if you are looking for an editor for your fully-funded, 12-year historical-critical edition project, read no further.) However, in some contexts, a licence fee is a problem: for instance, in small ad-hoc projects, in projects located in low-income countries, and in most teaching contexts, whether in the framework of a local curriculum or in workshop settings. And in many large-scale, long-term editing projects, the licence fee is certainly dwarfed by the staff costs the project involves, so no problem there either. Don’t get me wrong: producing a great software product and licencing it at a reasonable price to users who benefit greatly from its use is of course perfectly fine. And that price is the fact that oXygen requires a paid licence for any extended use. Of course, there is a price to pay for all of this. It entertains a close connection to the community that exists around the TEI and has, for instance, the TEI’s latest default schemas nicely integrated into the editor. In fact, it is an editing ecosystem rather than an editor. It is mature and packed with useful features, and yet every new version brings even more features and improvements. Virtually anyone working with XML files in the context of the Digital Humanities, and especially in the context of scholarly digital editing, knows the oXygen XML editor.
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