OpenDDS Modeling SDK Help Content Authoring Guide

Tools

Editing HTML files within Eclipse

There is a plug-in available for editing HTML files called Web Page Editor. For Eclipse 3.5 Galileo, to install the Eclipse Web Page Editor Go to "Help" > "Install New Software" Choose to work with the site

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo
Expand "Web, XML and Java EE development", Check "Web Page Editor" and click Next to continue with the install.

Some notes about Web Page Editor

Screen shots

Linux systems

If you're taking numerous screen shots under Linux consider the tool Shutter. It has a built-in editor that allows for operations like cropping, highlighting, and drawing ovals and rectangles to focus on a portion of the screen shot.

HTML indentation

A tool like Tidy can be used to indent HTML.

Checking links

The command line tool linkchecker can be used to verify that links in the HTML files are valid.

Style Guide

Referring to menu items

The style used in the official Eclipse help content is to put the menu path in bold and separate levels with a -> (use HTML code &#62 for >).

Embedding commands in help

It is possible to embed Eclipse commands in your HTML pages. This can allow, for example, the user to click on a link to activate a menu item (if there is a command associated with it) rather than just showing the menu item as static text. More information can be found in the Eclipse Help contents under Platform Plug-in Developer Guide > Programmer's Guide > User assistance support > Help > Help content > Embedding commands in help.

One way to determine what commandIds are available is to plugins.xml extensions view and select a command then click on the browse button near the commandId field. (Isn't there an easier way to do this?)

Duplicating content from the OpenDDS Developer's Guide

Some of the help content, such as the Policy definitions in the reference section, is based on HTML export from Framemaker. The exported stylesheet was used and minimal changes were made to the exported markup. Links that were invalid after breaking up the content into difference pages were fixed.