XMLmind is a free Java based XML editor. Apart from being free, the really nice thing about it is that it understands DTD, which means that it can validate your writings. Even better, at any point in your document it offers you picklists with valid DTD elements you can use. Also, you can edit the attributes of each element. I have been using it for a couple of days now and it has never failed me. XMLmind ships with a slightly modified docbook41.dtd. The modification ensures that spaces in some elements like <programlisting> are preserved so that indented lines will not be trimmed in output. XMLmind has two views. A more technical outline view and a WYSIWYG-like view based on an CSS declaration you put in your XML source. You can edit in both views. XMLmind ships with docbook41.css which gives you a good-enough document view. This view lets you easily paste sourcecode in <programlisting> elements. XMLmind takes care for translating the nasty characters like '<', '>', and '&' to the proper entities. This sounds pretty good. Are there any drawbacks? XMLmind has not been designed to edit big documents. It can edit an article or a chapter (~20-30 pages). It cannot edit a whole book. Download XMLmind from here.

This is a skeleton for a DocBook article like the one I am writing now.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="file:/D:/Tools/xxe-m13-bin/css/docbook41.css" ?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
   "file:/D:/Tools/xml/docbook-x-xxe/docbookx.dtd">
<article>
</article>