DITA and Help

We can use Help authoring tools (HAT) to provide Help for DITA Users. And we can use DITA to create Help files. How good is DITA as a HAT?

At this time, the DITA Open Toolkit is limited to Microsoft HTML Help for the web. And HTML Help is limited to Internet Explorer.

DITA OT can output JavaHelp and Eclipse Help.

Since DITA Users is entirely web-based, we wanted Help files that can play on the web, and on all browsers. MS HTML Help is not good enough. Moreover, we cannot generate MS HTML Help with our DITA Open Toolkit, since we are running on a Linux Apache server.

WebHelp versions from Adobe and Madcap are playable in all browsers. So we will work with Adobe and Madcap WebHelp until best weight loss we can generate our own WebHelp from the DITA Open Toolkit.

Here's a comparison of the leading Help Authoring Tools weight loss supplements with the current DITA Help capabilities.

     Microsoft HTML Help 1.x
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     WebHelp
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     no
   

     JavaHelp
   

     no
   

     no
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     Oracle Help
   

     no
   

     no
   

     yes
   

     no
   

     Eclipse Help
   

     no
   

     no
   

     yes
   

     yes
   

     Microsoft WinHelp
   

     no
   

     no
   

     yes
   

     no
   

     FlashHelp
   

     yes
   

     no
   

     no
   

     no
   

We used Madcap Flare 2.5 to produce WebHelp files for DITA Users support:

See DITA Users Help

We used Adobe RoboHelp 6 to convert the DITA Language Specification files to a Help interface with excellent full-text search: See (HTML version) and (Flash version)

Members of DITA Users can now build their DITA projects as Eclipse Help. Their output files appear as a Help book in the DITA Users Infocenter.

We have also created a DITA Infocenter using Eclipse Help that includes the DITA Language Specification, Architectural Specification, and OT User Guide in one searchable interface with TOC, Index, and Search.

Help authoring tools have always been topic-oriented. Their topics have generally been like DITA tasks, the steps needed to solve some problem. So DITA should be a fine authoring tool for Help.

References:

• DITA and Eclipse: A Powerful Combination Presented at the DITA 2007 conference on 2007-02-07. Guanjun Cai, IBM; Carolyn Henry, IBM; Jennifer Fell, IBM.