Johannes D. wrote: > > We are using the DITAC webhelp output with great succes. The only thing > that we miss is a more advanced search-function. > > I can see that spanning is not supported. I would like to know if it is > possible to pay for the development of spanning? And if so what would it > cost? > > What I would like is that if the user searches for e.g. "undersøger" the > result of the search is: > undersøgelse > undersøgelsen > undersøgte > > And so forth. > > Is that possible? >
There are 2 ways to implement this: [1] Using a quick and dirty hack (search substrings in the current word index). This will often work but even more often, this will degrade the usability of the current search facility of ditac's webhelp. [2] Support *stemming* for a number of languages. Example: "Danish stemming algorithm" -- http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/danish/stemmer.html Stemming -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming -- is a mandatory feature of any general purpose full-text search engine. We could have implemented stemming for a limited number of languages in ditac's webhelp. However, we have decided not to do so. Rationale: ditac's webhelp is expected to be used for technical documents (e.g. reference manuals). In this kind of documents, you generally search for exact words: PDF, FOP, Apache, Tomcat, servlet, configuration, manifest, -verbose, etc. In this case, stemming is not strictly needed. > I would like to know if it is > possible to pay for the development of spanning? And if so what would it > cost? We are definitely not interested in implementing [1]. Implementing [2] is not that easy (even with the help of Snowball -- http://snowball.tartarus.org/) and therefore I'm afraid the development costs would be ridiculously high. This being said, ditac's webhelp is generated using a *small* open source tool we have written: XMLmind Web Help Compiler -- http://www.xmlmind.com/whc.shtml This means that you can hire any Java programmer to enhance this tool. However be warned that we, XMLmind, are unfortunately not organized [a] to help third-party programmers extend our tools, [b] accept patches or enhancements implemented by third-party programmers. In practice, this means that the third-party programmer will have to fork the "XMLmind Web Help Compiler" project. -- XMLmind DITA Converter Support List [email protected] http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/ditac-support
