@Rob, Thanks for the additional information on DITA. I'll look into the DITA-OT project.
Another promising platform for Help Authoring might be EPUB3. Any place where there are many arrows behind the work and a sustained community would be a great help. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 10:02 To: dev@openoffice.apache.org; <orc...@apache.org> Subject: Re: INFO: OpenOffice help authoring On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <orc...@apache.org> wrote: < http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/201304.mbox/%3c00a001ce429b$f2418f70$d6c4ae50$@apache.org%3e> [ ... ] > DANGER, DANGER: Home brew help systems tend to never be finished, the content > tends to never be full migrated and consistently maintained. It would be > useful to use something that is as decoupled as possible from the product > builds while providing some well-defined bridge from contextual-help > triggers. A system with established endurance and open-source compatibility > would be ideal. Perhaps it is time to look at DITA and well-established > help-authoring aids. Important touch-points will be multi-lingual authoring, > accessibility, and modularity of creation. > I think that when Sun made their help system for OOo there was no good alternative around. So if they wanted a cross-platform solution it had to be a homebrew. But, as you note, that has costs. No doubt if we were doing something from scratch we'd use something like DITA, well-supported by tools. The advantage of DITA is we get the content into one standard format, and then using the open source DITA Open Toolkit (under Apache License) we can generate help in many useful formats, such as: XHTML PDF ODT Eclipse Help TocJS HTML Help Java Help Eclipse Content Word RTF Docbook Troff See: http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/1.7/ DITA also makes it easier to "slice & dice" the content, so we can maximize reuse. For example, I bet a list of spreadsheet functions and their parameters shows up in our help and our user guides. But this is duplicate content in two different systems. With DITA you could unify this content in one place, but still generate subsets of it into help format or PDF for download. -Rob [ ... ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
