Table of Contents

• Serna for Your Business
• Authoring Benefits
  • Create and Open XML Documents Easily
  • The Power of Dynamic XSL Rendering
  • Flexibility of the ContentMap Pane
  • Easy Manipulation of the ContentMap Elements
  • Context-Sensitive Element Help
  • Multilanguage Support
  • Large Document Support
• Functional Benefits
  • On-the-fly XML Schema Validation
  • External and Internal Entity Support
  • XInclude Support
  • Redline Documents for Collaborative Authoring
  • Printing and Publishing
• Interface Benefits
  • GUI Customization
  • GUI Internationalization
  • Multiple Document Interface

Serna for Your Business

Serna is designed as a Corporate XML Document (DITA, DocBook, S1000D) Editor , very easy to use yet extremely powerful. Dynamic rendering with XSL stylesheets makes the XML document authoring process much more simple and natural, and provides total flexibility of presentation.

XSL Rendered Docbook File.
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The screenshot above shows a Docbook file rendered with an XSL stylesheet based on Norman Walsh's Docbook XSL Stylesheets. Note that Serna requires only standard XSL for rendering.

Serna's dynamic XSLT allows you to see changes made in some element immediately propagated to other places where the element is referred. For example, if the user edits the title Overview (1), then the document TOC reference (2) and TOC navigation panel (3) are updated in sync.

Because of its great flexibility, Serna can be used for a wide range of business applications where gathering and maintaining business data is necessary (i.e, agendas, reports, product info sheets, etc.) In the screenshot below there's an example of a monthly report:

Business Data XML File.
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The advantage of dynamic XSL is that it allows intermediate results of entered data to be seen (report data, in this example), and also provides the user with helpful hints about entering the data. The resulting XML file does not contain any auxiliary data and is ready for processing (see the resulting report.xml file).

Serna may also be used for authoring arbitrary XML files (those without a specific stylesheet and/or XML Schema). They are presented in the so-called "Tag mode" (see next screenshot) that is also ruled by an XSL stylesheet, but has additional tag decoration. If there's no stylesheet provided, a default stylesheet is used:

An XML File Rendered in Tag Mode.
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