Introduction

Abstract

Overview of the package.

A common requirement for technical publications groups is to produce a Web-based help format that includes a table of contents pane, a search feature, and an index similar to what you get from the Microsoft HTML Help (.chm) format or Eclipse help. If the content is help for a Web application that is not exposed to the Internet or requires that the user be logged in, then it is impossible to use services like Google to add search.

Features

  • Sophisticated CSS-based page layout

  • Full text search.

    • Provides full content search of the documentation. Shows the search results with links to chunked pages, and a small description.

    • Word scoring/rating - For a particular word, the pages are weighted according to how many times that word appears in it, is it bold or not, is in index terms etc. The score out of 5 is shown by small colored boxes after each search-result

    • Stemming support for English, French, and German. Stemming support can be added for other languages by implementing a stemmer.

    • Support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean using code from the Lucene search engine

    • Search highlighting shows where the searched term appears in the results.

    • Search results can include brief descriptions of the target

  • Table of contents (TOC) pane with collapsible toc tree.

  • Auto-synchronization of content pane and TOC.

  • Nicely placed small forward, backward, top links

  • TOC and search pane implemented without the use of a frameset.

  • An Ant script to generate output. You can use this build file by importing it into your own or use it as a model for integrating this output format into your own build system.

Following are possible enhancements that can be applied to webhelp. You are welcome to send us new suggestions, code contributions etc.

Possible future enhancements

  • Move webhelp-specific parameters and gentext strings into base DocBook stylesheets.

  • Adjust css so that there is a visual indication that you have move the focus from the contents to the search tab using the tab key.

  • Add "Expand all" and "Collapse all" buttons to the table of contents.

  • Add other search options:

    • Add an option to use Lucene for server-side searches with table of contents state persisted on the server.

    • Add a simple form that uses a Google site:my.domain.com based search.

  • Support wild card characters in the search query.

  • Parameterize width of the TOC pane OR make the TOC pane resizeable by the user.

  • Automate search results summary text:

    • Automatically use the first non-heading content as the summary in the search results.

  • Support boolean operators in search.

  • Parameterize list of files to exclude from indexing. Currently it's hard coded that we don't index index.html and ix01.html (the legal notice and index topics). It should be smarter and automatically not index the index file even if it's not named ix01.html.

  • Improve performance by moving the table of contents div out of each page and into a separate JavaScript file which then adds it to the page.

  • Add to the indexer the ability to specify a list of files or file patterns not to index. Currently it does not index index.html or ix01.html, which is generally appropriate, but it should be up to the user to decide.

  • Add an index tab populated by a separate JavaScript file. Include a param/property that allows the content creator to disable the index.

  • Add functionality to the build.xml file so that when a property is set, the build generates a pdf version of the document and includes a link to it from the header.

  • Add breadcrumbs so the user will know what topics he's been to.

  • Consider using more advanced Lucene indexers for Chinese and Japanese than the CJKAnalyzer

  • And, a lot more (with duplicates) at WebHelp Wiki at XMLPress

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