[platform-help-dev] RE: platform-help-dev Digest, Vol 3, Issue 2

[Jenny Craven <jenny.craven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Frank, I can't speak for anyone else, but we completed exactly the same
project last year. We had about 20 books to convert to html.

We use the Homesite+ editor that comes with Dreamweaver...seems to have all
the functionality we need and was recommended by several professional web
content developers that I know. We use the same editor to maintain the .xml
files for the tocs. It views XML well enough to see and fix your errors. You
can also use Dreamweaver itself, but there is extra functionality that you
don't really need. Overall, you don't use a large number of tags if you keep
it simple, and if you back every tag up with a CSS style, presentation is
consistent.

CSE HTML Validator is a great low-cost tool with a similar built-in editor.
We use it to validate HTML syntax and links for production handoff. This is
an important quality check when you manage a large number of files with
internal and external links.

TopStyle is a popular .css editor and does a nice job helping you create a
common style that you can easily update or change.

We produce XHTML that validates to W3C syntax standards to ensure we can
convert to all XML if necessary. I am not sure that WebWorks output is clean
enough to qualify for W3C compliance, but it depends on what your objectives
are.

It is also important to set your objectives with the content: do you want to
present online books, or do you want to build an online help system with a
hierarchical design, reusable topics, and the ability to insert new content.
We develop all new content now directly in XHTML. FrameMaker seems clunky if
we have to go back to it for any reason. WebWorks is no longer in our
picture at all.

There are other tools and other strategies. It would be interesting to know
what other shops do. 

Regards,
Jenny Craven
jenny.craven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
858.480.3645


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Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 9:00 AM
To: platform-help-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: platform-help-dev Digest, Vol 3, Issue 2


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Today's Topics:

   1. Tools for creating and maintaining help files
      (Frank.Turovich@xxxxxxxxx)


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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 10:53:48 -0500
From: <Frank.Turovich@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [platform-help-dev] Tools for creating and maintaining help
	files
To: <platform-help-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID:
	<AADDB69D47B8C5498F30600FDC3CD904793B35@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

Am about to start converting several books worth of html files (100s of
files) into Eclipse ready help content and am wondering what tools everyone
else is using to do this? Have manually done this with a couple of small
books to learn the process but think that there is something I may be
missing to help me do the job more efficiently.

Having looked around, I see that there are several tools to create and
maintain the html files (Dreamweaver, etc.) but can find nothing that helps
me in setting up and maintaining the XML and TOC files for subsequent
updates. So, I'm wondering if this is always a manual process? If not, what
tools and processes do you use to keep your docs up-to-date and easy to
maintain?

Original books are in Adobe FrameMaker and conveted to HTML using
Quadralay's Webworks Publisher. After that, manual intervention appears to
be the only method to convert the HTML to work with Eclipe's help system.

Please tell me I've missed something that can help.

Thx // frank



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