----- Original Message ----- From: "Christoph Wilhelms" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 09:46 Subject: AW: New manual organization - printing is sometimes useful
> For printable reason someone could write a script putting all the small > .html's together into one big document. This could be the base for a (book) > printable version. or do XML -> PDF by other means. The Junit manuals are a good example of when a printable PDF manual is nice. > If we really want to "search" in Conor's version, we need a search-engine, > but I dont't think there is need for it, for the navigation is really > inutitive: You get an overview of all, build-in tasks and optional tasks and > THIS is what we need and the old version had a lack of! The navigation on conor's guide is good. The only weakness from my perspective is that my bookmark was always to the built in tasks page; now I have to bring up the main page and click down one. A trivial issue. One thing we could consider is to produce a CHM version of the helpfile. Transforming an HTML tree to CHM is a matter of -generate an index file (sort of an HTML list of entries) -run it through the chm compiler My (now rarely maintained) win32 FAQ does this (http://www.iseran.com/Win32/FAQ/) and it is nicely searchable, printable and easily bookmarkable. But when I look at the access logs for my win32 FAQ, last week's load was -1200 for faq.htm -500 for the faq broken up into sections -75 for the zipped -75 for the .chm So given the choice, most people seem happy to pull down the full doco and read through it, rather than take a fractured version. And the same number of people care about bandwidth as care about local searchability. So all in all, I dont think a .CHM version merits the effort, especially the effort of having to rebuild it on a windows box as part of the overnight process. Incidentally, I have the J2SE and J2EE javadoc filesets in .CHM for for anyone who wants them at 20MB and 4.5MB respectively. Handy if you do like local searchability. Any takers? -Steve
