Re: Help files

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Tue, 31 July 14:21 Peter Bloomfield wrote:
> Can someone give me a pointer to guidelines for help files? I added some
> text to help/C/balsa.sgml for adding IMAP subfolders, and it's there in
> CVS, but it doesn't seem to make it into any of the installed html files.
> 
> At one point, text in a <sect1 id="...">...</sect1> container went into its
> own html file, and text in a <sect2 id="...">...</sect2> container had a
> NAME anchor. That doesn't seem to be the case any more.
> 
> The ``GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation'' (
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/handbook/gdp-handbook/ ) has a
> section on ``Application Help Buttons'', but it's too cryptic for me--does
> anyone understand how to make this work?

Most of the processors for Docbook SGML seem to be unbelievably complex
and certainly unusable for the casual user.

Lately I've been using libxml2 and libxslt + the xsltproc tool which
is part of the latter package with good results (though I haven't tried
it on the Balsa docs).  Check out http://xmlsoft.org/ for more info.

Brian Stafford