# README: Web-based Help from DocBook XML

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the Software), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

- The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

- Except as contained in this notice, the names of individuals credited with contribution to this software shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from the individuals in question.

- Any stylesheet derived from this Software that is publicly distributed will be identified with a different name and the version strings in any derived Software will be changed so that no possibility of confusion between the derived package and this Software will exist.

Warranty:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL DAVID CRAMER, KASUN GAJASINGHE, OR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This package is maintained by Kasun Gajasinghe, kasunbg AT gmail DOT com and David Cramer, david AT thingbag DOT net.

This package also includes the following software written and copyrighted by others:

- Files in `template/common/jquery` are copyrighted by JQuery under the MIT License. The file `jquery.cookie.js` Copyright (c) 2006 Klaus Hartl under the MIT license.

jquery

- Some files in the `template/content/search` and `indexer` directories were originally part of N. Quaine's htmlsearch DITA plugin. The htmlsearch DITA plugin is available from the files page of the DITA-users yahoogroup. The htmlsearch plugin was released under a BSD-style license. See `indexer/license.txt` for details.

  htmlsearch
  DITA htmlsearch plugin

- Stemmers from the Snowball project released under a BSD license.

- Code from the Apache Lucene search engine provides support for tokenizing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean content released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Webhelp for DocBook was developed as a Google Summer of Code project.
2008-2010 Kasun Gajasinghe David Cramer
David Cramer dcramer AT motive DOT com david AT thingbag DOT net
Kasun Gajasinghe kasunbg AT gmail DOT com
August 2010

Overview of the package.

## Introduction

A common requirement for technical publications groups is to produce a Web-based help format that includes a table of contents pane, a search feature, and an index similar to what you get from the Microsoft HTML Help (.chm) format or Eclipse help. If the content is help for a Web application that is not exposed to the Internet or requires that the user be logged in, then it is impossible to use services like Google to add search.

Features

- Full text search.

  search features

  - Stemming support for English, French, and German. Stemming support can be added for other languages by implementing a stemmer.

    search stemming

  - Support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean using code from the Lucene search engine.

  - Search highlighting shows where the searched for term appears in the results. Use the H button to toggle the highlighting off and on.

    search highlighting

  - Search results can include brief descriptions of the target.

    search descriptions

- Table of contents pane with collapsible toc tree.

- Auto-synchronization of content pane and TOC.

- TOC and search pane implemented without the use of a frameset.

- An Ant `build.xml` file to generate output. You can use this build file by importing it into your own or use it as a model for integrating this output format into your own build system.

Possible future enhancements

- Move webhelp-specific parameters and gentext strings into base DocBook stylesheets.

- Use tabindex attributes to control the tab order in the output. The Contents and Search tabs should be first and second, then the search box and button, then the table of contents items, and so on.

- Add "Expand all" and "Collapse all" buttons to the table of contents.

- Add other search options:

  - Add an option to use Lucene for server-side searches with table of contents state persisted on the server.

  - Add a simple form that uses a Google site:my.domain.com based search.

- Sort search results based on relevance

- Support wild card characters in the search query.

- Parameterize width of the TOC pane OR make the TOC pane resizeable by the user.

- Automate search results summary text:

  - Automatically use the first non-heading content as the summary in the search results.

  - Automatically limit the size of the search description to something 140 characters.

- Support boolean operators in search.

- Parameterize list of files to exclude from indexing. Currently it's hard coded that we don't index `index.html` and `ix01.html` (the legal notice and index topics). It should be smarter and automatically not index the index file even if it's not named `ix01.html`.

- Improve performance by moving the table of contents div out of each page and into a separate JavaScript file which then adds it to the page.

- Add to the indexer the ability to specify a list of files or file patterns not to index. Currently it does not index `index.html` or `ix01.html`, which is generally appropriate, but it should be up to the user to decide.

- Add an index tab populated by a separate JavaScript file. Include a param/property that allows the content creator to disable the index.

- Add functionality to the `build.xml` file so that when a property is set, the build generates a pdf version of the document and includes a link to it from the header.

- Add breadcrumbs so the user will know what topics he's been to.

- Consider using more advanced Lucene indexers for Chinese and Japanese than the CJKAnalyzer

features

## Using the package

The following sections describe how to install and use the package on Windows.

Installation instructions

### Generating webhelp output

To install the package on Windows

The examples in this procedure assume a Windows installation, but the process is the same in other environments, mutatis mutandis.

- If necessary, install Java 1.6 or higher.

  1. Confirm that Java is installed and in your `PATH` by typing the following at a command prompt:

         java -version

     To build the indexer, you must have the JDK.

- If necessary, install Apache Ant 1.6.5 or higher.

  1. Unzip the Ant binary distribution to a convenient location on your system. For example: `c:\Program Files`.

  2. Set the environment variable `ANT_HOME` to the top-level Ant directory. For example: `c:\Program Files\apache-ant-1.7.1`.

     See How To Manage Environment Variables in Windows XP for information on setting environment variables.

  3. Add the Ant `bin` directory to your `PATH`. For example: `c:\Program Files\apache-ant-1.7.1\bin`

  4. Confirm that Ant is installed by typing the following at a command prompt:

         ant -version

     If you see a message about the file `tools.jar` being missing, you can safely ignore it.

- Download Saxon 6.5.x and unzip the distribution to a convenient location on your file system. You will use the path to `saxon.jar` in below.

  The `build.xml` has only been tested with Saxon 6.5, though it could be adapted to work with other XSLT processors. However, when you generate output, the Saxon jar must not be in your `CLASSPATH`.

- In a text editor, edit the `build.properties` file in the webhelp directory and make the changes indicated by the comments:

      # The path (relative to the build.xml file) to your input document.
      # To use your own input document, create a build.xml file of your own
      # and import this build.xml.
      input-xml=docsrc/readme.xml

      # The directory in which to put the output files.
      # This directory is created if it does not exist.
      output-dir=docs

      # If you are using a customization layer that imports webhelp.xsl, use
      # this property to point to it.
      stylesheet-path=${ant.file.dir}/xsl/webhelp.xsl

      # If your document has image directories that need to be copied
      # to the output directory, you can list patterns here.
      # See the Ant documentation for fileset for documentation
      # on patterns.
      #input-images-dirs=images/**,figures/**,graphics/**

      # By default, the ant script assumes your images are stored
      # in the same directory as the input-xml. If you store your
      # image directories in another directory, specify it here.
      # and uncomment this line.
      #input-images-basedir=/path/to/image/location

      # Modify this so that it points to your copy of the Saxon 6.5 jar.
      xslt-processor-classpath=/usr/share/java/saxon-6.5.5.jar

      # For non-ns version only, this validates the document
      # against a dtd.
      validate-against-dtd=true

      # Set this to false if you don't need a search tab.
      webhelp.include.search.tab=true

      # indexer-language is used to tell the search indexer which language
      # the docbook is written.  This will be used to identify the correct
      # stemmer, and punctuations that differs from language to language.
      # see the documentation for details. en=English, fr=French, de=German,
      # zh=Chinese, ja=Japanese etc.
      webhelp.indexer.language=en

- Test the package by running the command `ant webhelp -Doutput-dir=test-ouput` at the command line in the webhelp directory. It should generate a copy of this documentation in the `doc` directory. Type `start test-output\index.html` to open the output in a browser. Once you have confirmed that the process worked, you can delete the `test-output` directory.

  The Saxon 6.5 jar should not be in your `CLASSPATH` when you generate the webhelp output. If you have any problems, try running ant with an empty `CLASSPATH`.

- To process your own document, simply refer to this package from another `build.xml` in arbitrary location on your system:

  1. Create a new `build.xml` file that defines the name of your source file, the desired output directory, and imports the `build.xml` from this package. For example:

         <project>
           <property name="input-xml" value="path-to/yourfile.xml"/>
           <property name="input-images-dirs" value="images/** figures/** graphics/**"/>
           <property name="output-dir" value="path-to/desired-output-dir"/>
           <import file="path-to/docbook-webhelp/build.xml"/>
         </project>

  2. From the directory containing your newly created `build.xml` file, type `ant webhelp` to build your document.

     The Saxon 6.5 jar should not be in your `CLASSPATH` when you generate the webhelp output. If you have any problems, try running ant with an empty `CLASSPATH`.

### Using and customizing the output

To deep link to a topic inside the help set, simply link directly to the page. This help system uses no frameset, so nothing further is necessary.

See Chunking into multiple HTML files in Bob Stayton's DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide for information on controlling output file names and which files are chunked in DocBook.

When you perform a search, the results can include brief summaries. These are populated in one of two ways:

- By adding role="summary" to a para or phrase in the chapter or section.

- By adding an abstract to the chapterinfo or sectioninfo element.

To customize the look and feel of the help, study the following css files:

- `docs/common/css/positioning.css`: This handles the Positioning of DIVs in appropriate positions. For example, it causes the `leftnavigation` div to appear on the left, the header on top, and so on. Use this if you need to change the relative positions or need to change the width/height etc.

- `docs/common/jquery/theme-redmond/jquery-ui-1.8.2.custom.css`: This is the theming part which adds colors and stuff. This is a default theme comes with jqueryui unchanged. You can get any theme based your interest from this. (Themes are on right navigation bar.) Then replace the css theme folder (theme-redmond) with it, and change the xsl to point to the new css.

- `docs/common/jquery/treeview/jquery.treeview.css`: This styles the toc Tree. Generally, you don't have to edit this file.

#### Recommended Apache configurations

If you are serving a long document from an Apache web server, we recommend you make the following additions or changes to your `httpd.conf` or `.htaccess` file. TODO: Explain what each thing does.

    AddDefaultCharSet UTF-8 #

          # 480 weeks
          <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$"> #
          Header set Cache-Control "max-age=290304000, public"
          </FilesMatch>

          # 2 DAYS
          <FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt)$">
          Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, public, must-revalidate"
          </FilesMatch>

          # 2 HOURS
          <FilesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
          Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7200, must-revalidate"
          </FilesMatch>

          # compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain #
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

          # Or, compress certain file types by extension:
          <Files *.html>
          SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
          </Files>

See Odd characters in HTML output in Bob Stayton's book DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide for more information about this setting.

These lines and those that follow cause the browser to cache various resources such as bitmaps and JavaScript files. Note that caching JavaScript files could cause your users to have stale search indexes if you update your document since the search index is stored in JavaScript files.

These lines cause the the server to compress html, css, and JavaScript files and the brower to uncompress them to improve download performance.

### Building the indexer

To build the indexer, you must have installed the JDK version 1.5 or higher and set the `ANT_HOME` environment variable. Run `ant build-indexer` to recompile `nw-cms.jar`

ANT_HOME
indexer building

### Adding support for other (non-CJKV) languages

To support stemming for a language, the search mechanism requires a stemmer implemented in both Java and JavaScript. The Java version is used by the indexer and the JavaScript verison is used to stem the user's input on the search form. Currently the search mechanism supports stemming for English and German. In addition, Java stemmers are included for the following languages. Therefore, to support these languages, you only need to implement the stemmer in JavaScript and add it to the template. If you do undertake this task, please consider contributing the JavaScript version back to this project and to Martin Porter's project.

- Danish

- Dutch

- Finnish

- Hungarian

- Italian

- Norwegian

- Portuguese

- Romanian

- Russian

- Spanish

- Swedish

- Turkish

## Developer Docs

This chapter provides an overview of how webhelp is implemented.

The table of contents and search panes are implemented as divs and rendered as if they were the left pane in a frameset. As a result, the page must save the state of the table of contents and the search in cookies when you navigate away from a page. When you load a new page, the page reads these cookies and restores the state of the table of contents tree and search. The result is that the help system behaves exactly as if it were a frameset.

### Design

An overview of webhelp page structure.

DocBook WebHelp page structure is fully built on css-based design abandoning frameset structure. Overall page structure can be divided in to three main sections

- Header: Header is a separate Div which include company logo, navigation button(prev, next etc.), page title and heading of parent topic.

- Content: This includes the content of the documentation. The processing of this part is done by DocBook XSL Chunking customization. Few further css-styling applied from `positioning.css`.

- Left Navigation: This includes the table of contents and search tab. This is customized using jquery-ui styling.

  - Tabbed Navigation: The navigation pane is organized in to two tabs. Contents tab, and Search tab. Tabbed output is achieved using JQuery Tabs plugin.

  - Table of Contents (TOC) tree: When building the chunked html from the docbook file, Table of Contents is generated as an Unordered List (a list made from `<ul> <li>` tags). When page loads in the browser, we apply styling to it to achieve the nice look that you see. Styling for TOC tree is done by a JQuery UI plugin called TreeView. We can generate the tree easily by following javascript code:

        //Generate the tree
        $("#tree").treeview({
        collapsed: true,
        animated: "medium",
        control: "#sidetreecontrol",
        persist: "cookie"
        });

  - Search Tab: This includes the search feature.

### Search

Overview design of Search mechanism.

The searching is a fully client-side implementation of querying texts for content searching, and no server is involved. That means when a user enters a query, it is processed by JavaScript inside the browser, and displays the matching results by comparing the query with a generated 'index', which too reside in the client-side web browser. Mainly the search mechanism has two parts.

- Indexing: First we need to traverse the content in the docs/content folder and index the words in it. This is done by `nw-cms.jar`. You can invoke it by `ant index` command from the root of webhelp of directory. You can recompile it again and build the jar file by `ant build-indexer`. Indexer has some extensive support for such as stemming of words. Indexer has extensive support for English, German, French languages. By extensive support, what I meant is that those texts are stemmed first, to get the root word and then indexes them. For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, it uses bi-gram tokenizing to break up the words. (CJK languages does not have spaces between words.)

  When we run `ant index`, it generates five output files:

  - `htmlFileList.js` - This contains an array named `fl` which stores details all the files indexed by the indexer.

  - `htmlFileInfoList.js` - This includes some meta data about the indexed files in an array named `fil`. It includes details about file name, file (html) title, a summary of the content.Format would look like, `fil["4"]= "ch03.html@@@Developer Docs@@@This chapter provides an overview of how webhelp is implemented.";`

  - `index-*.js` (Three index files) - These three files actually stores the index of the content. Index is added to an array named `w`.

- Querying: Query processing happens totally in client side. Following JavaScript files handles them.

  - `nwSearchFnt.js` - This handles the user query and returns the search results. It does query word tokenizing, drop unnecessary punctuations and common words, do stemming if docbook language supports it, etc.

  - `{$indexer-language-code}_stemmer.js` - This includes the stemming library. `nwSearchFnt.js` file calls `stemmer` method in this file for stemming. ex: `var stem = stemmer(foobar);`

#### New Stemmers

Adding new Stemmers is very simple.

Currently, only English, French, and German stemmers are integrated in to WebHelp. But the code is extensible such that you can add new stemmers easily by few steps.

What you need:

- You'll need two versions of the stemmer; One written in JavaScript, and another in Java. But fortunately, Snowball contains Java stemmers for number of popular languages, and are already included with the package. You can see the full list in Adding support for other (non-CJKV) languages. If your language is listed there, Then you have to find javascript version of the stemmer. Generally, new stemmers are getting added in to Snowball Stemmers in other languages location. If javascript stemmer for your language is available, then download it. Else, you can write a new stemmer in JavaScript using SnowBall algorithm fairly easily. Algorithms are at Snowball.

- Then, name the JS stemmer exactly like this: `{$language-code}_stemmer.js`. For example, for Italian(it), name it as, `it_stemmer.js`. Then, copy it to the `docbook-webhelp/template/content/search/stemmers/` folder. (I assumed `docbook-webhelp` is the root folder for webhelp.)

  Make sure you changed the `webhelp.indexer.language` property in `build.properties` to your language.

- Now two easy changes needed for the indexer.

  - Open `docbook-webhelp/indexer/src/com/nexwave/nquindexer/IndexerTask.java` in a text editor and add your language code to the `supportedLanguages` String Array.

    Add new language to supportedLanguages array

    change the Array from,

        private String[] supportedLanguages= {"en", "de", "fr", "cn", "ja", "ko"};
            //currently extended support available for
            // English, German, French and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages only.

    To,

        private String[] supportedLanguages= {"en", "de", "fr", "cn", "ja", "ko", "it"};
          //currently extended support available for
          // English, German, French, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and Italian languages only.

  - Now, open `docbook-webhelp/indexer/src/com/nexwave/nquindexer/SaxHTMLIndex.java` and add the following line to the code where it initializes the Stemmer (Search for `SnowballStemmer stemmer;`). Then add code to initialize the stemmer Object in your language. It's self understandable. See the example. The class names are at: `docbook-webhelp/indexer/src/com/nexwave/stemmer/snowball/ext/`.

    initialize correct stemmer based on the `webhelp.indexer.language` specified

              SnowballStemmer stemmer;
              if(indexerLanguage.equalsIgnoreCase("en")){
                   stemmer = new EnglishStemmer();
              } else if (indexerLanguage.equalsIgnoreCase("de")){
                  stemmer= new GermanStemmer();
              } else if (indexerLanguage.equalsIgnoreCase("fr")){
                  stemmer= new FrenchStemmer();
              }
        else if (indexerLanguage.equalsIgnoreCase("it")){ //If language code is "it" (Italian)
                  stemmer= new italianStemmer();  //Initialize the stemmer to italianStemmer object.
              }
              else {
                  stemmer = null;
              }

That's all. Now run `ant build-indexer` to compile and build the java code. Then, run `ant webhelp` to generate the output from your docbook file. For any questions, contact us or email to the docbook mailing list docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org.