Developing Custom DITA-based Help Systems

This topic introduces solutions for moving your DITA source content into one of several existing help run-time environments.

If your company has developed a custom Help viewer or run-time environment, it is unlikely that the default output from an existing DITA Help plug-in will be what you need. This section of the Best Practices Guide explains how to DITA plug-ins to generate the base ingredients for a custom help implementation. You will need to invest some amount of post-processing effort, therefore, to integrate output from multiple DITA plug-ins and/or to customize output for exactly what you need.

Figure 1. DITA Source to Customized Help Environments

We can't really help you with these post-processing or customization tasks, but we can help you generate the ingredient content and point out some common issues that might affect your customizations.

Plug-in/Tool Output ... Useful for ...
CSHelp Plug-in    
Dynamically rendered HTML    
HTMLSearch Plug-in    
TOCJS and TOCJSBIS Plug-in    
VistaHelp-style Expandable Content    
WinAnt Options and Outputs    
XHTML DITA-OT Transform