Can I generate Eclipse Help from Madcap Flare?

[sagar_garuda]

Hello experts,

I am currently on madcap version 6.1.

I publish my documents in Web Help format and a necessity has arised which requires me to publish the documents to Eclipse Help.

Is there a way that I could publish to Eclilpse Help using madcap flare?

[Madcap Guru]

Currently Flare doesn't support Ecliplse Help, but the more people who request it the better the chance they will add it.

In my past role in support, there was a client who took webhelp and with there developer made it into eclipse help, but it wasn't easy

[adrian]

We use Flare to generate Eclipse help but it is not easy. We generate WebHelp and run the toc and topic files through a Korn shell script to change tags and remove some stuff.

The reason we went to Flare was that we were in RoboHelp when tasked with coming up with finding a way to produce Eclipse help. RoboHelp was difficult to work with and Flare seemed a step up.

We are currently looking at oxyGen which is the only editor that I know of that allows you to directly generate Eclipse help plugins. You still have to do some tweaking with the output but not as much as in Flare. However, oxyGen is a feature bloated, usability nightmare. And if you are a tech writer, oxyGen help is supremely annoying.

Flare does a good job managing xrefs. Not sure about oxyGen on that score.

[LTinker68]

And, of course, submit a feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx asking for the ability to produce Eclipse output. The more who request it, the sooner it might get added.

[adrian]

And, of course, submit a feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx asking for the ability to produce Eclipse output. The more who request it, the sooner it might get added.

Been there, done that, did it again today.

[LTinker68]

And, of course, submit a feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx asking for the ability to produce Eclipse output. The more who request it, the sooner it might get added.

Been there, done that, did it again today.

Now if sagar_garuda does the same, then that will be two of you! Hopefully there are more out there who want Eclipse help and will submit a feature request, too.

[sagar_garuda]

Hello Rick, Lisa, and Adrain.

Thank you all for responding to my query.

Lisa and Adrain, I have submitted the enhanacement request too . Lets hope that Mapcap provides Eclipse Help support in the next release.

My team has found an easy way of taking the published output from flare and integrating into Eclipse Help .

Here are the steps:
1> Publish the document to WebHelp from Flare
2> Navigate to Output -> Data folder
3> Open the Toc.xml in word or Notepad++
4> Run a macro which modifies the Toc.xml file.
The following is a list of tags that need to be modified or deleted from the Toc.xml file (generated from MadCap Flare) by the macro:
•TocEntry – replace with topic
•Title - replace with label
•Link= - replace with href=
•PageNumber="*" – to be deleted
•PageNumberReset="*" – to be deleted
•conditions="*" – to be deleted
•ComputedResetPageLayout="*" – to be deleted
•ComputedFirstTopic="*" – to be deleted
•DescendantCount="*" – to be deleted
•StartChapter="*" – to be deleted
•StartSection="*" – to be deleted
•CatapultToc - to be replaced with toc
•ChapterNumberReset="*" – to be deleted
•ChapterNumberFormat="*" – to be deleted
•ChapterNumber="*" – to be deleted
•VolumeNumberReset="*" – to be deleted
•SectionNumberReset="*" – to be deleted
•ComputeToc="*" – to be deleted
•ReplaceMergeNode="*" – to be deleted
•/Content/ - to be replaced with toc/<guidename>/

Provide the modified Toc.xml file and the content folder to the developer who will integrate the same into Eclipse Help from the Eclipse Plug-in Development Perspective.

Hope this helps!
Regards,
Sagar

[RamonS]

Hi Sagar! May you please send this to MadCap support as well if you haven't done so already? If that is all there is to do to convert WebHelp into Eclipse help then this is so easy that it should be possible to add that even to a dot release. Adding that to Flare should take a developer a day tops.

[ksoltys]

We are currently looking at oxyGen which is the only editor that I know of that allows you to directly generate Eclipse help plugins. You still have to do some tweaking with the output but not as much as in Flare. However, oxyGen is a feature bloated, usability nightmare. And if you are a tech writer, oxyGen help is supremely annoying.

WebWorks ePublisher can generate Eclipse Help. I haven't tried it so I can't comment on how good the output is - I just use their WebHelp output, which is just fine.

Keith

[wbrisett]

I've also requested Eclipse help in the past from MadCap. Currently the jobs that require us to produce Eclipse help output, are things we do use WebWorks, so for those who mentioned this, it does work and seems to work quite well. We work in DITA for these projects, so WebWorks is quite seamless. I may have to try Sagar''s suggestion with some content to see what happens. Seems like an easy fix.

Wayne

[jasonsmith]

Eclipse needs a topic to act as a toc root element, a good idea is to have something like a Welcome! page with a minitoc. Set this topic to be the "root" element of your online help, i.e. set up the rest of the content as sub-chapters in the Flare TOC and generate the WebHelp target. Then use an XSL stylesheet to transform your Flare webhelp Toc.xml file (located in the Data folder of the WebHelp output folder) into the required eclipse toc.xml. There is most probably a far more elegant way to do this than the code below, but it seems to work for me.

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">    
    <!-- Generate an Eclipse TOC from a MadCap Flare WebHelp Toc.xml file   -->    
    <xsl:template match="CatapultToc">
        <!--       Generate toc root element from  top level TocEntry element  -->
        <xsl:for-each select="TocEntry">         
            <toc>
                <xsl:attribute name="label">                                  
                    <xsl:value-of select="./@Title"/>
                </xsl:attribute>
                
                <xsl:attribute name="topic">                                  
                    <xsl:value-of select="./@Link"/>
                </xsl:attribute>            
                <!--       Generate first level topic element from  second level TocEntry element  -->
                <xsl:for-each select="TocEntry"> 
                    <topic>                
                        <xsl:attribute name="label">                                  
                            <xsl:value-of select="./@Title"/>
                        </xsl:attribute>                
                        <xsl:attribute name="href">                                  
                            <xsl:value-of select="./@Link"/>
                        </xsl:attribute> 
                        <!--       Insert more nested levels here as required  -->
                    </topic>
                </xsl:for-each>     
            </toc>
        </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template> 
</xsl:stylesheet>

[jasonsmith]

I've discovered a better way to generate Eclipse Help from Flare projects that uses a combination of two targets. It also uses Oxygen for an XSL transformation of a Ditamap.
1) Build WebHelp target (Select Advanced > Use custom file extension =html in the Target Editor) and move folder with topics, images stylesheets etc. to Eclipse plug-in.
2) Build DITA target using the same TOC.
3) Open Ditamap in Oxygen and perform Eclipse Help transformation.
4) Rename generated ditamap.xml to toc.xml and move this together with generated index.xml to Eclipse plug-in.
5) Test Eclipse plug-in.

There are a couple of things to watch out for:
Don't use topic or graphic filenames that contain spaces or special characters or that start with a number (DITA transformation will fail).
Don' t use Index Links in your MadCap project (Index will not be generated in full).