RE: [docbook-apps] search engine with docbook

["David Cramer" <dcramer@motive.com>]

I recently adapted the htmlsearch plugin for DITA to use with our DocBook system. Basically htmlsearch a java indexer and some JavaScript goo. It works ok with some limitations. For example, there's no stemming (if you search for "started" you will get no hits for pages that contain only "start" and vice versa) and for Asian languages I'm going to have to adapt it so that it only searches meta keyword tags (and then beef up the meta keyword tags so they contain keywords and any indexterms). The problem is that the simple indexer looks for spaces and punctuation to figure out what a word is. Japanese has no spaces between words and little punctuation.

 

I do hope to share this work with the DocBook community (the htmlsearch plugin has a BSD-style license), but I'm not sure when I'll have time to pull it out of our build system and put it into a format someone else could use.

 

Depending on your situation, you could also generate Ecilpse doc plugins and set up an Eclipse infocenter (which uses Lucene internally). Or like Scot suggests, generate a chm from DocBook, open the htmlhelp.hhp file in RoboHELP, and generate WebHelp from that.

 

David

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From: Marvin, Scot [mailto:scotm@amazon.com]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 10:16 AM
To: BG; docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [docbook-apps] search engine with docbook

Hey BG:

 

What I’ve done in the past is generated the HTML and then used the HTML in a help application tool (HAT), like Flare or RoboHelp.

 

If you’re programmatically-inclined, you could generate a HAT-like output with DocBook and then add the Lucene search engine to it. More info at http://lucene.apache.org/.

 

Or, there’s the old stand-by: generate one long page and use the browser’s search feature. It’s yucky, but functional.

 

That’s all the ideas I have right now.

 

-Scot

 

 

From: BG [mailto:llo-143e5@myamail.com]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 6:49 AM
To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [docbook-apps] search engine with docbook

 

Hi,
I realize an online help (html) with docbook and I would like to integrate a search engine.
Are there solutions to integrate a search engine with docbook?

Moreover I am a little amazed because having a search engine in an online help is very common, nevertheless I don't find many solutions on the subject.

Thank you,
BG

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