Tripane
Self on Help
Thoughts from the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee Chair
In earlier musings about full-text search, I wondered whether the lack of full-text search (FTS) in the standard DITA OT XHTML outputs was restrictive. Bob Doyle pointed out that Eclipse Help InfoCenters provide FTS, and that led to some further wonderings about the complexity of Eclipse Help installations. I've since noticed some DITA users have come up with some ingenius workarounds so that DITA content can be turned into beautiful "WebHelp" output just like that produced by HTML-based Help Authoring Tools. Discussions on the DITA Users list have revealed that Bjarne Melin uses CHM2Web to convert a DITA OT-produced CHM file to a very professional-looking "WebHelp" format. Other people, including Joe Gelb, use a similar workflow but import the CHM source files generated by DITA OT into RoboHelp, and generate the WebHelp from there. Nadege Quaine has developed a JavaScript search DITA OT plug-in, which creates a neat FTS facility without any "post-processing". Shawn McKenzie wrote another plug-in which creates a DHTML TOC. Perhaps if Shawn's and Nadege's work was brought together, it would be possible to generate a professional "WebHelp" tripane output directly through the DITA OT?
Nadege's plugin
Hi Tony,
I haven't heard about this plugin before. Is it available for download somewhere?
I already use Shawn's tocjs plugin, and I don't see why you shouldn't be able to us both of them together. (Sure, you would have to construct some kind of frameset to house the various bits, but that's not rocket surgery.)
Thanks,
Martin
Plugin from Yahoo DITA Users
Hi Martin
You will find the plug-in in the Yahoo dita-users group files area (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/files/Demos/)
Tony
Thanks
Hi Tony,
Thanks very much. I have just tried it and it looks good. Now I just need to integrate it with tocjs, and I'll be set.
Thanks,
Martin