Re: help file formats (was: Re: [Pyobjc-dev] problem accessing outlet)

[Donovan P. <ds...@ma...>]

On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 02:42 PM, Steven D. Arnold wrote:

> On 10/29/02 4:31 PM, "Jack Jansen" <Jac...@or...> wrote:
>
>>
>> Bill Fancher contributed a script to convert the Python manual
>> from it's HTML form to the form required by Apple Help Viewer
>> (see Mac/OSX/setupDocs.py in the Python CVS tree).
>>
>> Even though help viewer is a [censored] piece of [censored]
>> (although it's slightly better in Jaguar, admitted) it has the
>> advantage of the search engine and of everyone understanding it.
>> And I think it would be good to have all the Python
>> documentation together in one place, which would then have
>> sections for Python Language, IDE, PyObjC and anything else.
>
> That makes a lot of sense.  It almost sounds like I should use a 
> version of
> XML with some tool that can convert to HTML, text, or other formats.  I
> could then hack the script you mentioned so that the same XML source 
> could
> be converted to Apple Help format.
>
> I'll do a search for such tools; if anyone knows of such a tool, 
> please send
> me a link.  In the absence of such a tool, I'll go ahead with HTML for 
> now,
> and keep my eyes open.

There's been some work done recently on the documentation tool that 
Twisted uses (http://www.twistedmatrix.com). It used to be called 
generate-domdocs and it basically took XHTML and used some special 
attributes to indicate where function reference, python source files, 
etc should be placed. Moshe Zadka refactored it recently into a 
package, twisted.lore, and added LaTeX support (and thus, ps and pdf 
support)

You might want to drop by #twisted on irc.openprojects.net or email the 
twisted list to get more information. I personally would be interested 
in adding Apple Help Viewer support to lore. The only question is would 
I have time to do it :)

Donovan