RE: [docbook-apps] Web-based help from Docbook

["David Cramer \(Tech Pubs\)" <dcramer@motive.com>]

> David Cramer (Tech Pubs) wrote:
> > 3. Make the world a better place by figuring out a way to solve the 
> > search part in an open source and internationalized way...then it 
> > would be easy to make a kit that gives you a toc/index pane 
> and search pane.
> > The toc/index part is easy and can be done any number of ways. 
> 
> Just out of curiosity - because I truly don't know - what are 
> the i18n issues around full text search?

I don't know either, but I when I did my searching, most of the little
search utilities I found either said outright that they supported a
limited set of languages or were suspiciously silent on the subject. 
 
> I was hoping I could cobble together a pure html/javascript 
> tripane with toc/index/search using only open-source tools, 
> but I see it may be more difficult that I first guessed.  

That would be a wonderful thing--see below for more details.

> I'm 
> a tech writer and not a coder by trade, so I may not be the 
> best person to be working on this. 

Me too :-) 

> But there seems to be a 
> lot of interest in new tools to replace RoboHelp, especially 
> their Web Help format, so this is a good opportunity for 
> DocBook to pull something out of its hat.

Yes, I'm certain that very many people would be happy to have a
crossplatform, browser based help system with at least a toc and search
pane (index pane would be nice too) without using RoboHelp.

One feature I would like to see in such a system is the ability add
content and have it included in the toc and scope of the search (and, if
an index pane is included, those would need to be combined too). For
example, we often have webapps were the UI has more or less stuff
depending on what components are installed. We don't know ahead of time
what components and what versions of what components will end up being
deployed together, so it's not practical to write one big help set for
everything the UI might have (aside from the fact that the help will
then talk about stuff that's not installed). We need to be able to write
help for each component that can be installed when the component is
added to the system. Just as the UI magically grows links/tabs/panes
with the new components, the help needs to magically add topics.

To work, this all would have impact the install as little as possible.