7/26/2023 0 Comments Instruction xmlmind xml editor![]() ![]() ![]() Two of these are JHelpDev and JHelp Builder, which provide a graphical environment in which you can create help topics and all the supporting files needed by a JavaHelp system. It’s a powerful and flexible system, and Linux has several authoring tools available for creating JavaHelp systems. JavaHelp is designed to deliver online help for software written in Java. The drawback, for some, is that you have to pay for QuickHelp. It can also compile the topics into a professional-looking help system that includes navigation, an index, and even a simple search engine. The popular application QuickHelp is a graphical help-authoring tool that enables technical writers to easily write and format help topics. While Linux help authoring tools can’t compare to their Windows counterparts, several strong Linux tools can help you develop online help. Not everyone wants to read or even thumb through a manual. The Open Toolkit is easy to use and can transform DITA content to HTML, XHTML, PDF, Eclipse Help, or RTF. Right now, the only way to convert a DITA document to a more usable format on Linux is with the DITA Open Toolkit for Linux. ![]() In addition, XXE lacks support for the DITA conref attribute, which enables you to reuse content by storing a reference to another DITA element. XXE also supports DITA, although the current version can’t convert DITA documents to other formats. ![]() My text editor of choice is Emacs in conjunction with psgmlx, which is what I use with DocBook. Several editing tools both support DITA and run on Linux. You can use DITA to create just about any kind of documentation, but it’s best suited for Web content, online help, computer-based training, knowledge bases, and FAQs.īecause DITA is based on XML, you can use any text or XML editor to author DITA documents. Rather than being based on the traditional book-chapter-section format, DITA is meant for creating individual topics that you can combine and reuse in different types of documentation and in different delivery formats. Over the last couple of years, Oasis Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has been attracting a lot of attention among technical writers - so much so that it’s starting to eat into the market share of DocBook. If you want to go GUI, then look at XMLmind FO Converter (XFC), which combines an XSL processor and an XSL-FO processor in a point-and-click package. To create PDF, PostScript, or RTF files, first run your document through an XSL processor and then through an XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) processor such as the free Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) or the commercial RenderX XEP Engine. For most formats, you can use an XSL processor such as the popular Saxon or xsltproc. The stylesheet determines the output format, and the XSL processor does the grunt work. You produce output in DocBook by applying XSL stylesheets to your files using an XSL processor. Vex, an XML editor based on Eclipse, is an excellent DocBook editor, as is XMLmind XML Editor (XXE), a WYSIWYG editor written in Java. A tutorial explains how to use Vim as a DocBook editor. Others use Vim, along with a script or two. Some writers use Emacs with the psgmlx or nXML packages. Since DocBook files are XML, you can edit them in any XML or text editor. This enables you to maintain all of your information in one file rather than in multiple documents. You can also author multiple documents that contain much of the same content, but which are intended for different users or different operating systems. You can use DocBook to output documentation in multiple formats, including PDF and PostScript (for printing), HTML, HTML Help, and JavaHelp. It’s a variant of XML designed specifically for authoring software and hardware manuals. The DocBook Project isn’t an application, but it is arguably the biggest gun in the Linux technical writing arsenal. All of them give technical writers the ability to author and publish professional documentation. Linux users can take advantage of a number of documentation tools, including both free or open source software (FOSS) and proprietary software. While Linux lacks standard Windows tools such as FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and WebWorks Publisher, it’s still a viable environment for technical writers. Documentation is a necessary evil of software development. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |