On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <orc...@apache.org> wrote: > @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. >
I think EPUB will be an important format as well. I find myself, for example, really liking the experience of working through tutorials by having the book on my iPad as I work the main application on my laptop. It has some of the advantages of a standalone book, with the advantages of electronic documentation. And much better than alt-tabbing between a PDF and the main application. One way of getting to EPUB is from DITA. There is a plugin for the DITA Open Toolkit that targets EPUB and Kindle formats: http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net/ > Any place where there are many arrows behind the work and a sustained > community would be a great help. > I agree. -Rob > - 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 > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
