RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: Generating CHM HTML Help files from DocBook?

["Bradford, Denis" <denisb at rational dot com>]

Jirka has indeed created a nifty piece of work. I'm not much farther along
than you are, but can respond to a few items:

1. Download Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/h
tml/hwMicrosoftHTMLHelpDownloads.asp . Just open the generated .hhp file in
this tool, fix the TOC and a few other things, and recompile. You could
probably use Robohelp, ForeHelp, as a front end, too.

2. Linux? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, HTML Help is
for Windoze only.

3. Be careful when you run htmlhelp.xsl to back up files that require
hand-tweaking, like the project file itself and external files like the TOC.
So far I've customized the stylesheet to add the alias and .h files required
for mapping topics to context-sensitive GUIs; otherwise you have to add
these to the .hhp manually each time. Now if I can just figure out how to
use the DocBook TOC elements, I'm hoping that authors can code the TOC
correctly in the XML source so that it gets generated correctly.

Hope this is helpful,

______________
Denis Bradford 
Rational Software, 20 Maguire Road, Lexington, MA 02421
denisb@rational.com (781)676-7560
--
Superstition: the religion of others -- Ambrose Bierce


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan York [mailto:dyork@e-smith.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 8:41 AM
To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: Generating CHM HTML Help files from DocBook?


Folks,

Now that we (e-smith) are part of Mitel Networks, I have been 
working with their documentation folks to bring our docs in line 
with what they are doing.  They turn out to mostly use tools like
RoboHelp to generate Microsoft HTML Help or RoboHelp "WebHelp" files.

Without really having a clue about what I was doing, I generated  (from
my DocBook XML source) a set of HTML Help files using Norm's htmlhelp
XSL stylesheets, zipped them up and sent them off to the folks there.
They were able to very easily generate a single ".chm" help file and 
were quite impressed with the output (although they said the TOC was
a bit funky).  So I have a couple of questions for anyone on the list
who has worked with HTML Help:

 1. Are there any free/open-source apps that can take HTML Help files
    and generate this single CHM file?  If not free/oss, are there
    any utilities that Microsoft supplies that do this?

 2. If so, are there any that run on Linux and can be scripted from
    the command line?  (I am envisioning adding another target to my
    Makefile so that "make all" builds not only HTML (chunked and
    single-page) and PDF, but also HTML Help.)

 3. Any other pointers or tips that people may have from working with
    Norm's HTML Help stylesheets?

Thanks in advance,
Dan

-- 
Dan York, Director of Training        dyork@e-smith.com
Ph: +1-613-751-4401  Mobile: +1-613-263-4312 Fax: +1-613-564-7739 
Mitel Networks Corporation Network Server Solutions Group 
150 Metcalfe St., Suite 1500, Ottawa,ON K2P 1P1 Canada
http://www.e-smith.com/            open source, open mind

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