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I've been using Illustrator's Data-Driven Graphics, for one of my projects. But dread using command-line programing to populate all the fields. Is there a GUI app to manage, edit and save Adobe Illustrator compatible xml files?

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XML is a text based format, so not sure what kind of GUI you are looking for. You typically edit XML in any text editor. Some IDEs will have XML editors that let you edit the nodes individually. If you google 'XML IDE' you will find lots of options. – DA01 Aug 2 '12 at 16:46
Hmm, I'm assuming you are using XML to create an SVG graphic, using Illustrator to just import the data as XML? So, then the question is what are you trying to do that requires the command line and I (or someone else) might be able to offer you an alternative solution. – Ryan Aug 2 '12 at 17:34
You are spot on @Ryan. I know how to edit in a regular text editor but since I am using multiple variables on multiple records, what I am usually doing is creating the records in excel => saving as csv => an using gawk (commandline bash) to generate a the xml for use in illustrator. This allows me to modify and easily survey the information and then parse to xml withouth doing it by hand on an texteditor. – DaveO Aug 3 '12 at 15:51
Okay see my answer below than, should do the trick for you perfectly. – Ryan Aug 3 '12 at 17:36

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Try this site, I think it is exactly what you are looking for (I'm not positive though): http://shancarter.com/data_converter/

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Looks like this should work. I'll give it a try and post back. Thank You! – DaveO Sep 12 '12 at 16:11
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XML is text. Any plain text editor will work. You simply don't want a rich text editor such as word.

You can use Text Edit, the default text application on the Mac OS. But you must go into its preferences and tell it to ignore RTF commands on open and save.

I prefer BBEdit from barebones.com. But that's merely my preference.

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I also had good experiences with its little brother TextWranger. Not sure it covers his specific needs though. – KMSTR Aug 3 '12 at 5:49
Thank you @Scott I do use a couple of text editors (Sublime 2 on the desktop) and VIM on the terminal , however as I explained above to Ryan, I was hoping to avoid my rutine of {excel => saving as csv => an using gawk (commandline bash) to generate a the xml for use in illustrator.} and use a tool to easily edit or add records from a table a la excel but saving to illustrator compliant xml – DaveO Aug 3 '12 at 15:53
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If you have Design Premium, then you also have Dreamweaver, which does a nice job of editing XML, complete with syntax highlighting. Design Standard, iirc (I've not used CS4 in a long time) should also come with the ExtendScript Toolkit, which is mostly thought of as a javascript IDE but also includes XML syntax highlighting (under View > Syntax Highlighting > XML).

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