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multi platform help

 
Greenhorn
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Hi! I'm currently looking for a solution to finding
a hypertext help system that may be used on different
platforms (Linux, MS-Windows...). What we're
looking for is a help system which not only has a similar
user interface on all platforms, but, more importantly,
the same help file format. We really don't want to re-enter
help text using a different word processor/desktop publishing
system for each platform.


I am aware that the MS-Windows world does come with the tools
necessary to build a hypertext help system (using MS-Word).
Can this be ported to the Unix/Motif world at all?


Any guidance or other ideas would be appreciated.
Liat
 
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one acronym: HTML
another: PDF

Those are pretty well universal (with PDF I think being unavailable on platforms without a graphical user interface and HTML looking different on those).
 
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Why don't use Eclipse help system? It is very good.
 
Ranch Hand
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Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:
one acronym: HTML
another: PDF



Better, write in an xml and have it rendered into both.
Years ago I wrote a part of such a system. It wasn't xml
but a proprietary format (and quite stupid). I wrote the
part that translated the source files to pdf using TeX
and somebody else wrote a perl script to generate html.
We used the pdf as a manual and html as a context help
and it worked very well.

Today I would probably use docbook. I wouldn't have to care
about writing any tools...

P.
 
Jeroen Wenting
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Been there, done that.
That wasn't documentation though, it was stock quotes that had to be output (as requested) in either HTML, CVS, or PDF.
Servlet generating the data as XML forwarding to another servlet generating the final output using either XSLT or XSL:FO depending on the request.
 
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