RE: [docbook-apps] Uncompiled HTML Questions

Hi,

I’m using a combination of JavaScript and XSL to generate framed WebHelp, and was wondering if anyone else is doing something similar because I’d like to do a couple of additional things, but not sure how to approach them.

Before I ask my questions, I’ll explain a few things about what I am generating.

I have 2 frames, the left frame is the navigation frame and the right frame contains the individual topic contents. The left nav frame has three tabs, the Contents, a customised JS search and an Index tab.

1. The Contents uses the same mechanism as CHM generation.

2. The search indexes all unique words in the help except ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’, etc., and maps them to their respective topics. Searching for a word results in a list of topics where the word exists.

3. The index tab required a little bit of extra work because it was being generated as a topic rather than a tab. To solve this, I simply changed the chunking to not put the header and footer content on this topic, and modified the navigation panel content to include a third tab that points to this index topic.

Now, I’ll try to explain what else I’d like to do, without causing too much confusion.

1. Currently, if I link to an individual file, there is no navigation panel. I’d like to be able to link to a topic and always have the nav panel display. Does anyone know how I could make this work? I have tried several JavaScript options by placing some script code in the index.html file head tag as well as the individual chunked HTML file head tags. This should allow linking to a file using http://.../index.html?ch03.html or something similar. Unfortunately, this does not work as described in this tutorial: http://scriptasylum.com/tutorials/frameredirect/frameredirect.html

2. I would like to be able to highlight the search results in the topics. I know this is a complicated request as it would require adding tags dynamically around search keywords, then removing them after navigating away from the search panel or when a new search is performed. Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.

3. I would like the current topic to be highlighted in the TOC similar to how the CHM works. This includes expanding the necessary books.

4. I would like to remove the root topic title from my breadcrumb link. I have removed this topic from my help as it is not necessary, but cannot figure out how to remove it from the breadcrumb (we have a very long product name so this makes the breadcrumb link very long as well). NB. I do not want to delete the content, only the reference in the breadcrumbs. J

5. My current index lists an index term followed by any topic that contains that term. See example below. Unfortunately, because it is in the left panel, this doesn’t look very nice. I would like to be able to only show the term, and when a user clicks on that term, a small pop-up comes up that lists the topics (and their links) where that keyword is located.

6. I would like to be able to collapse the left navigation panel.

I realise that is a huge list of questions, and it is likely that nobody is doing any of this, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. I have not provided any xsl or js code, but can if necessary.

It is worth noting that I am new to JavaScript and have only been working with XSL for a year, so I consider myself a beginner, so any information would be extremely useful.

Thanks in advance,

Laurie Burley

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