[ros-dev] Documentation

[Klemens Friedl]

On 9/21/07, Steven Edwards <winehacker at gmail.com> wrote:
> There was a win32 chm compiler and example help file submitted to
> wine-patches a while back. Feel free to import that and the htmlhelp
> dlls and viewer. Your going to need it anyway to be compatible with
> Windows documentation.

other chm tools:
http://www.jedrea.com/chmlib/
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/code/#hhm

In near future, we will need a chm and hlp viewer in ReactOS. A chm
viewer will require a HTML (render) engine, e.g. download gecko
activex control during first start of the app.

As an alternative, we could use PDF files for our own (currently not
existing) ReactOS help-system.
It would be less cumbersome to include (to our svn repo; e.g.
"rosapps") a lightweight pdf library plus a basic pdf viewer app (not
a Acrobat competitor, but similar to MacOS X pdf viewer, or KDE/Gnome
pdf viewer) in comparision to "beasts" like gecko (mozilla) or webkit
(apple).
(I have already investigated in this direction maybe there is interest
for such a solution.)


> Did I mention I hate docbook?
> Wine used to use SGML for docs and we hated it.
Old docbook versions required the complex SGML, newer versions use XML.
our unmaintained docbook svn dir:
http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/rosdocs/

> [...] ReactOS used docbook before and we hated it. I
> used to also have to use docbook for my job and I hated it.

In retrospect a funny snip from our rosdoc's readme.txt:
"This document should be written in RosDocs, to demonstrate its power. But
since RosDocs is, let's be frank, vaporware, and since I'm still looking for an
XML editor that 1) doesn't suck and 2) isn't written in Java (but this is a bit
redundant), *and* since I was supposed to finish this document some two weeks
ago, hand-formatted plaintext wins, for the moment."
-- by our beloved dev and ex-librarian KJK::Hyperion ;)


> Wiki's are the way to go.
Mozilla uses MediaWiki too, similar to our setup with language interlink.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Main_Page
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/About_JavaScript

> Use a wiki with an export feature and export it to a standard open
> format that you can plug in to HTMLhelp later.
MediaWiki allows both basic HTML syntax as well as the special Wiki
syntax; you can even mix them in one document.

MediaWiki extention - PDF export:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export


Klemens