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Subject:Re: Help Authoring, standard approach From:"Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:29:08 -0800 (PST)
Viorel wrote:
> What is the low-budget/freeware/open-source
> approach to a corporate help authoring system
> on Windows platform?
> That is, what is the solution for creating and
> maintaining a production help system (context-
> sensitive help and manuals) based on open or
> semi-open standards?
> Is there a universal solution like docbook on Linux?
I've used DocBook tools to create prototypes of a complete single
sourced doc set, including outputs of rtf, pdf, html, chm, and fo. It
seems to work well, but I haven't yet tried it in production.
I too am interested in setting this up successfully in a production
environment. I've always thought it was very promising as a free/better
alternative to the commercial Windows HATs. Please contact me if you'd
like to compare notes (I'll probably have more time for this after the
holidays...).
I've set up DocBook environments several times. It's a bear to set up,
but worth the effort. Here are some of my observations:
1. Don't worry about what editor to use at first. Just get a good
syntax-highighting code editor and write your docs in XML. If you have
a well-structured Word doc you can probably convert by hand in an hour
or so. Once you get everything working, then you can think about a
graphical editor.
2. You can set up a useful DocBook toolchain in either Windows or
Linux. For Windows though, you may have to do some research to track
down the latest version of the binaries. I suppose there are Linux
distros that have everything set up nicely out-of-the-box, but I
haven't investigated yet. Actually I suppose all distros include some
DocBook tools, but I'd want to investigate the differences, and how
easy their setup is to customize. If you set it all up from scratch,
obviously you can customize it any way you want.
3. The toolchain that works best for me is DocBook XML/XSL with
xsltproc. The java-based tools work too but are slower; don't use a
java-based tool unless it has a feature you can't get otherwise.
4. For print-based output, consider using the older DSSSL stylesheets
with OpenJade to create RTF (as opposed to fop=>rtf/pdf). Then you can
use your favorite pdf writer to create pdf. YMMV, but depending on your
needs, it may be simpler to maintain the OpenJade/DSSSL toolchain than
to get involved with java and fop.
Mike O.
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