docbook-apps

  • 1.  WebWorks Help Output

    Posted 01-11-2010 15:25
    Are there any tools that support generating WebWorks help from DocBook?
    It seems that WebWorks does not, it currently supports DITA exclusively.

    Our team here is looking to move from FrameMaker to an XML format and it
    looks like DocBook is a much better mapping for the style of content we
    produce, but a number of our product use WebWorks. or MadCap Flare, to
    generate help systems. This seems to be a major sticking point.

    I personally find that DITA is overly restrictive and geared towards
    making bad writers less bad, so I would be less than thrilled to be
    forced into using it because of a lack of commercial tool support.



  • 2.  RE: [docbook-apps] WebWorks Help Output

    Posted 01-11-2010 16:06
    If I understand your requirement, it's a fairly typical one: you need a
    web-based help output with a toc and search pane and some kind of index.
    Eclipse would be great except it's a webapp and you'd rather have
    something with a pre-indexed, client-side search that you can just drop
    on a web server or include in another webapp with no further work.

    For a while, we generated html help output, then opened the htmlhelp.hhp
    file with RoboHelp and generated it's webhelp. That was a pain though
    because it was a manual step in an otherwise automated process. I
    understand that Flare can be run from the command line and that it's
    project files are xml files, so you could probably generate a chunked
    html output from docbook, generate the required Flare project files (the
    toc and search index file or whatever it needs), then have your build
    script run Flare on that to make their webhelp.

    If you don't need anything too fancy, you could also have a look at
    this: http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/docbook-webhelp/index.html

    Good luck,
    David

    >


  • 3.  RE: [docbook-apps] WebWorks Help Output

    Posted 01-12-2010 13:15
    Hi Eric,

    another option is to adapt tocjsbis plugin for DITA which outputs html frames with javascript navigation tree based on YUI library.

    Actually, the word "adapt" is used very loosely. This whole thing assumes little more XSLT coding and building quite elaborate customization layer but you do not have to reinvent the wheel as the DITA plugin gives you clear idea how this all works no matter what XML documentation vocabulary you may use.

    You can also employ custom library written by N. Quaine (author of the plugin) for synchronizing nodes in the javascript tree with page displayed. It is part of the plugin.

    For more information visit bellow links:

    http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/files/Demos/
    http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/treeview/

    Best regards,
    Pavel Škopík