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Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] [GSOC] About DocBook WebHelp Project


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Hi Visitha,
It sounds like you've taken all the right initial steps. Indeed, the
idea behind DocBook is to provide an XML vocabulary for marking up
technical documents semantically and the tools to transform those XML
documents into artifacts that can be consumed by humans (pdf, epub,
webhelp, etc).

To further your exploration, if you like IDEs and build-in
convenience, you should check out the oXygen XML Editor [1]. It's
commercial, but they're generous with licenses for people working on
open source projects. They also include Webhelp from the previous GSoC
and the webhelp output in the svn tree [2] includes code that they
have contributed back. oXygen includes assisted authoring for writing
DocBook documents, xslts, xproc pipelines, etc.

I'd encourage you to explore XPath and XSLT. XSLT can be a bit
mind-bending at first, but is fun and powerful in the long run. Use
some resources on the web. The DocBook xsls are a great way to learn
xslt since they exercise so many features. Pay attention to the
differences between xslt 1.0 and 2.0. XSL 2.0 is more powerful, but
it's good to learn xsl 1.0 since it's more widely supported.

You might also look at XProc [3] as a related technology. If the GSoC
project ends up porting the webhelp output to the xslt 2.0 stylesheets
[4], then using an xproc pipeline to build it would be an interesting
project. Another interesting project that includes webhelp support is
the Docbkx maven plugin [5].

All this will introduce you to some interesting technologies that will
come in handy throughout your career.

But before all that additional exploration, your real next step is to
put together a proposal! In addition to the ideas on the Webhelp ideas
page on the xmlpress wiki [6]. I'll be happy to priorities the
features presented there, and others on this list using webhelp will
have their own ideas on what should be added, changed, or improved in
webhelp and what the priorities should be.

Thanks for your interest and let me know when you have further questions.

Regards,
David

[1] http://www.oxygenxml.com/
[2] http://snapshots.docbook.org/xsl/webhelp/docs/content/index.html
[3] http://xproc.org/
[4] https://github.com/docbook/xslt20-stylesheets
[5] https://code.google.com/p/docbkx-tools/
[6] http://docbook.xmlpress.net/tiki-index.php?page=WebHelpIdeas

> What I got about this conversion is, the Xsltproc takes both xsl
> style sheet which I targeted and my xml source document and produce
> a our desired output(in my case html) according to xsl style sheet.
> Please correct me if I wrong..!!

Yes, that is correct, but xsltproc is just one xsl processor. Also
popular are Saxon and Xerces (both implemented in Java). The webhelp
sample ant script uses Saxon.

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