Looking for a good SGML editor

I'm currently writing a small book, and I'm intending to mark it up all using the DocBook SGML DTD (www.docbook.org). I'm not all that savvy regarding SGML DTDs, though I'm slowly reading my way through the definitive O'Reilly book on the subject. What I'm looking for is a good app to do my editing in, so I don't have to resort to marking it up manually.

I usually word process in KWord, but I don't think you can specify a DTD for it to use. The same goes for OpenOffice. I've had a look at KLyx but it didn't seem to be quite what I wanted, because my book isn't technical, and KLyx specialises in marking up technical writing (like formulae, etc)... (maybe I'm wrong!).

Has anyone any suggestions?

I think you are wrong about KLyx. I used Lyx for writing business stuff (letters, bills, reminders) and i had a friend use it for his diploma (politics, about 250 pages with several 100s footnotes - and see, unlike MS-Word2000, they all printed right ).
Not sure though if KLyx is Lyx with KDE Interface or a program of its own!

Have a closer look (at Lyx), i think it could definitively be the program of your choice, especially if you know already how SGML works.
Also (if you did not already), have a look at the LaTeX macros. They are a great help once you got them setup correctly...

Yeah, LyX is a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor (which I never did like, but I digress), it won't do DocBook as far as I know.

Manually marking your stuff up really isn't that bad. It takes just about as long as it would to do as some GUI editor where you'd have to choose what sort of element you were dealing with anyway. I do all of my DocBook stuff in vim (which does all the syntax highlighting goodness for SGML markup), and it's more than adequate for the task.

Hrm ,well I've been hand-coding all my HTML for years now (old habits die hard), so hand-coding SGML has come fairly easily to me. I might just stick with Kate and Vim for the moment, which are both more than adequate.

That said, I'd like to try out some WYSIWYG editors, as markup can be quite distracting when writing - I often lose my chain of thought putting in a footnote - so I'll have to give Lyx a try. It's a shame the GUI is so ugly... damn KDE for setting my standards too high!

Yes, lyx IS ugly...

But why should it not work with DocBook? I didn´t use lyx for years and I am no SGML pro, but with my html knowledge and a little understanding of the system, i made my own style sets for lyx and i also merged style sets from other people into mine.
Lyx should be able to import the DTD, if not, then there has to be converters.

Ah, I wasn't aware of the fact that LyX grokked DTD's. That's kinda cool. It's still ugly though

I also don't think that the markup really gets in the way if you have syntax highlighting on in whatever editor you are using it. It clearly distinguishes between what is content and what is markup.

Sorry, what I meant wasn't that it makes it difficult to read, but that it interrupts my writing. This is more of a social sciences book than a technical one, and sometimes I'll be writing away, put in a footnote or some other markup, then I'll realise I can't remember the syntax or the possible attributes, and I'll lose my train of thought. I don't get that so much with WYSIWYG editors.

I'm currently downloading Lyx (well, all the dependencies... zzz on a 56k modem!) so I'll report back with my thoughts on it It's a shame that they stopped working on KLyx; it was done by the same people, with a nice KDE frontend, but they stopped updating it, so it's missing lots of bug fixes and features in the current version of Lyx.

I'd really like it if the KWord team put some options to grok user SGML/XML DTDs and then work with SGML/XML documents properly. AFAIK KOffice uses XML for its files, but it can only use its own DTD

I feel the same way, so what I do is write a chapter at a time, then go back and add the markup later. That way, you can be in a writing zone, then when you've had enough, get into an sgml zone (if there is such a thing...)