WebHelp is a form of online help consisting of a series of web pages (XHTML format). Its
advantages include continuous content update and platform independence, since it can be viewed
using a regular web browser.
Oxygen XML Editor plugin
allows you to publish a
DITA Map into a WebHelp format that provides both Table of Contents and advanced search
capabilities.
WebHelp Output
The layout is composed of two frames:
- left frame, containing separate tabs for Table of Contents and
Search;
- central frame where help pages are displayed.
To publish the DITA map to WebHelp, you can use the
DITA Map WebHelp
transformation. You can further customize the out-of-the-box transformation, by editing some
of its parameters:
- args.xhtml.toc - name of the table of contents file. Default setting is
toc.html;
- use.stemming - controls whether or not you want to include stemming
search algorithms into the published output. Stemming is the process for reducing
inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their stem,
base or root form – generally a written word form.
Default setting is false.
- clean.output - deletes all files from the output folder before the
transformation is performed. Default setting is no.
The
Search tab is enhanced with a rating mechanism that computes
scores for every page that matches the search criteria. These scores are then translated into
a 5-star rating scheme. The search results are sorted depending on:
- number of keywords found in a single page. The higher the number, the better.
- context - if a word is found in a title or emphasised section of text it scores better
than a word found in a unformatted text.
WebHelp Search with Stemming Enabled
Rules applied during search:
- keywords are separated by the space character. An expression like spray painting
counts as two separate keywords: spray and painting;
- do not use quotes to perform exact search for multiple-word expressions. An expression
like "spray painting", returns no results in our case, because it searches for two
separate words: "spray and painting" (note the quote signs attached to each
word);
- indexterm and keywords DITA elements are an effective way to increase the
ranking of a page. For example, content inside keywords elements weighs twice as
much as content inside a H1 HTML element;
- words composed by merging two or more words with colon (":"), minus ("-"), underline
("_"), or dot (".") characters, count as a single word.