RE: [docbook-apps] WebWorks Help Output

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

If I understand your requirement, it's a fairly typical one: you need a
web-based help output with a toc and search pane and some kind of index.
Eclipse would be great except it's a webapp and you'd rather have
something with a pre-indexed, client-side search that you can just drop
on a web server or include in another webapp with no further work.

For a while, we generated html help output, then opened the htmlhelp.hhp
file with RoboHelp and generated it's webhelp. That was a pain though
because it was a manual step in an otherwise automated process. I
understand that Flare can be run from the command line and that it's
project files are xml files, so you could probably generate a chunked
html output from docbook, generate the required Flare project files (the
toc and search index file or whatever it needs), then have your build
script run Flare on that to make their webhelp. 

If you don't need anything too fancy, you could also have a look at
this: http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/docbook-webhelp/index.html 

Good luck,
David

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Johnson [mailto:emjohnso@progress.com] 
> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 9:25 AM
> To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [docbook-apps] WebWorks Help Output
> 
> Are there any tools that support generating WebWorks help 
> from DocBook? 
> It seems that WebWorks does not, it currently supports DITA 
> exclusively.
> 
> Our team here is looking to move from FrameMaker to an XML 
> format and it looks like DocBook is a much better mapping for 
> the style of content we produce, but a number of our product 
> use WebWorks. or MadCap Flare, to generate help systems. This 
> seems to be a major sticking point.
> 
> I personally find that DITA is overly restrictive and geared 
> towards making bad writers less bad, so I would be less than 
> thrilled to be forced into using it because of a lack of 
> commercial tool support.
> 
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