Re: [docbook-apps] Thanks!

[David Cramer <david@thingbag.net>]

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I'd suggest finding common solutions to the major issues and
contributing back to the distribution so you can avoid fixing the same
problems in different ways and having to maintain those in your own forks.

Maybe start with some discussion here and based on your conclusions log
bugs and feature requests in the issue tracker. Patches are welcome and
if you want to be more deeply involved you could become a contributor.

I'm happy that people are finding webhelp useful, but I'm not using it
in my current role so I haven't paid too much attention to it lately.

I think starting off with some general discussion about goals would be a
good place to start. For example, is it important that it work from the
file system? That places some constraints on what you can do (e.g. no
lazy loading of the toc).

What are the main frustrations? One of mine would be that the way the
toc works bloats the pages for large books.

Should other options for search be provided? E.g. you could replace the
javascript search with a Google site search. Believe it or not, all the
books in the "API Documentation" portion of this site is actually
webhelp (it's my former employer and I was involved in the implementation):

http://docs.rackspace.com/servers/api/v2/cs-gettingstarted/content/overview.html

The header and footer is provided from a single location "as a service"
and pulled in to each page with some javascript and the search is
powered by a google custom search.

Just to give you ideas of what's possible.

Regards,
David

On 9/5/14, 3:19 AM, Barton Wright wrote:
> Hi Mary,
> 
> Ditto what Nat said. 
> 
> Thanks!
> ~Barton Wright
> 
> 
>> Hi Mary,
>>
>> I'd be interested in your solutions to your webhelp issues. I've currently got webhelp in beta, with HTML and PDF in production. I've come across a number of webhelp issues and I'm not happy with this format yet.
>>
>> Nat
>>
>>> On 5/09/2014, at 1:35 pm, Mary Tabasko <tabasko@telerama.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi, gang.
>>>
>>> I just joined this list, and I wanted to start off by offering
>>> a HUGE thanks to everyone who maintains the DocBook Stylesheets
>>> and the related resources.
>>>
>>> (I accidentally sent this message to the docbook list; this is a resend
>>> to the right address.)
>>>
>>> We have been using them where I work for years, and we would
>>> not be able to do the things we've done without them! Over the
>>> years, I've been asked to do some things that I was not sure would
>>> be possible, but the stylesheets have provided a terrific basis for
>>> a bunch of crazy things.
>>>
>>> So thanks!
>>>
>>> We are just finishing up a project to move some large documents
>>> we produced as Microsoft Help (CHM) output to the Webhelp format.
>>> We've been trying to replace MSHelp (the compiler is getting harder
>>> and harder to keep running), but were having no luck finding a suitable
>>> replacement, until we stumbled on the Webhelp transforms.
>>>
>>> We did run into some non-trivial issues and ended up doing a fair
>>> amount of work to get what we wanted, but we got very close
>>> to our wishlist, and it wouldn't have been possible without the
>>> Webhelp transforms. So thanks again.
>>>
>>> I didn't want to dump a long list of the issues we had and
>>> how we dealt with them, but if anyone is interested, I'd be
>>> happy to describe them (and send a screen shot of what we
>>> ended up with). Some of it might be useful or informative
>>> in relation to a few of the bug/issue reports I've seen on them,
>>> but I don't want to offer unsolicited input.
>>>
>>> Thanks again! You guys rock!
>>>
>>> -- Mary Tabasko
>>>
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