Syntext Serna Free is a user-friendly XML editor for creating content with no commercial use. It is available on various operating systems and is mainly intended for personal use, open-source documentation, and education.
Serna Free uses XSLT and XSL-FO to render documents with a print-like appearance, offering a range of document rendering options. This includes localized generated content, profiled views, in-line attribute editing, and the composition of a document from multiple chunks. Exceptional DITA 1.1 support is provided and the software comes with an integrated DITA Open Toolkit. The flexible visualization of DITA maps and topics makes it easy to resolve referred content and engage in in-place editing of local conrefs.
Serna Free offers a range of features including:
- Available for Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista), Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC
- Built-in support for all popular document types (DITA, Docbook, XHTML, TEI P4, NITF, etc.)
- On-the-fly document validation against XML Schemas
- Context-sensitive element help
- Entity and XInclude in-place editing
- Drag-and-drop with on-the-fly validation
- UNICODE support and multilingual spell checking
- User interface localized into several languages (including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Igbo, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish).
Overall, Serna Free is a highly recommended software option for those looking to engage in non-commercial XML authoring. The software is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, and offers powerful features for document rendering and DITA authoring. Its availability across multiple platforms and languages make it an excellent choice for a range of users.
Version 4.1: Added drag`n`drop between opened documents, added a number of new hot keys, DITA-related bugs fixed