# 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 and with contributions by Arun Bharadwaj and Visitha Baddegama. Please direct support questions to the DocBook-apps mailing list.

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/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.

- Code that provides weighted search results and some other improvements was graciously donated by SyncRO Soft Ltd., the publishers of the oXygen XML Editor.

- TagSoup, released under the Apache 2.0 license, makes it possible to index html instead of just xhtml output.

- Cosmetic improvements provided by OpenStack.

Webhelp for DocBook was first developed as a Google Summer of Code project.
2008-2012 Kasun Gajasinghe David Cramer
David Cramer david AT thingbag DOT net
Kasun Gajasinghe kasunbg AT gmail DOT com
January 2012

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

- Sophisticated CSS-based page layout

- Client-side search.

  search features

  - Provides full content search of the documentation. Shows the search results with links to chunked pages, and a small description.

  - Search results scoring/rating - The results are weighted according to how many times the words in search query appears in it, is it bold or not, is in index terms etc. The score out of 5 is shown by small colored boxes after each search-result.

  - Search results can include brief descriptions of the target.

    search description

  - 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 languages using code from the Lucene search engine.

  - Search highlighting shows where the searched term appears in the results.

    search highlighting

- Table of contents (TOC) pane with collapsible toc tree.

- Auto-synchronization of content pane and TOC.

- Nicely placed small forward, backward, top links

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

- An Ant script and sample Makefile to generate output. You can use the ant build file by importing it into your own or use it as a model for integrating this output format into your own build system. Alternatively, you can use the build scripts as a template for creating your own script. You can also generate webhelp from DocBook using the Docbkx Maven plugin.

features

## Using the package

The following sections describe how to install and use the package on Windows with the sample Ant build script. In an environment where unix shell command are available, you can also use the `Makefile.sample` as a starting point for creating your build script. To use `Makefile.sample` you must have `xsltproc` and `java` available in your `PATH`.

Installation instructions

### Generating webhelp output using the Ant build.xml file

To install the package

The examples in this procedure assume a Windows installation, but the process is the same in other environments, mutatis mutandis. In an environment where unix shell command are available, you can also use the `Makefile.sample` as a starting point for creating your build script. To use `Makefile.sample` you must have `xsltproc` and `java` available in your `PATH`. You can also use the Docbkx Maven plugin to generate webhelp.

- 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 1.8.0 or higher. See Ant installation instructions.

  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-1.8.0`.

     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-1.8.0\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`.

- Download Xerces2 Java and extract it to a convenient location on your file system. You will need the `xercesImpl.jar` and `xml-apis.jar` from this distribution in in .

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

  You must set appropriate values for `xslt-processor-classpath`, `xercesImpl.jar`, and `xml-apis.jar`.

  See the DocBook reference documentation for detailed information about the available webhelp and other parameters. Note that not all DocBook parameters are passed in to the xsls by the `build.xml` by default. You may need to modify the `build.xml` to pass in some DocBook parameters.

      # 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 the follosing so that they point to your local
      # copy of the jars indicated:
      # * Saxon 6.5 jar
      # * Xerces 2: xercesImpl.jar
      # * xml-commons: xml-apis.jar
      xslt-processor-classpath=/usr/share/java/saxon-6.5.5.jar
      xercesImpl.jar=/usr/share/java/xercesImpl.jar
      xml-apis.jar=/usr/share/java/xml-apis.jar

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

      # The extension for files to be indexed (html/htm/xhtml etc.)
      html.extension=html

      # 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

      # Enables/Disables stemming
      # Stemming allows better querying for the search
      enable.stemming=true

      # Set admon.graphics to 1 to user graphics for note, tip, etc.
      admon.graphics=0
      suppress.footer.navigation=0

- 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.

- 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.

### 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.

    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.

### Search indexing

Run `ant index` in the webhelp directory to index the content. Running `ant webhelp` will do the indexing as part of the process as well.

Here's some detailed information about invoking the indexer. The indexing process is pretty smooth, so probably you doesn't need to be concerned with following details. Webhelp Ant script does all the needed bits.

- Following should be in the CLASSPATH.

  - `webhelpindexer.jar`, `lucene-analyzers-3.0.0.jar`, `lucene-core-3.0.0.jar` - These three are available in the extensions/ directory of docsbook-xsl-1.76.1, and is automatically fetched to the webhelp's Ant script. Go for a XSL snapshot if you can which contains the latest version http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshot/

  - `xercesImpl.jar`, `xml-apis.jar` - These two comes by default with Ant 1.8.0 or prior versions. These are available under /usr/share/java directory of Linux distributions as well. Else, you may have to download, and put them to `jre/lib/endorsed`.

- The main class is com.nexwave.nquindexer.IndexerMain for the version 1.76.1+. It's com.nexwave.nquindexer.IndexerTask for the versions 1.76.0 and 1.76.1.

  - Needs two parameters as command-line arguments:

    - The folder where the files to be indexed reside

    - (Optional) language. defaults to "en". See build.properties for details

  We have changed the way we invoke the webhelp indexer from the Ant Task to `indexertask` to direct invocation. This seems to have remove the `CLASSPATH` issue some people were having.

To build the indexer, you must have installed the JDK version 1.5 or higher and set the `ANT_HOME` environment variable.

search indexing
indexer CLASSPATH
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

stemming

### Adding images

This section shows how to add images to WebHelp. For that, follow the simple procedure given.

- Put the images in a subdirectory of your source file directory. For example `docsrc/images`.

- Then refer to those images from your docbook document.

  Following image is from webhelp/docsrs/images/sample.jpg. The docbook code is shown below.

  Sample Image

  Example code for adding images. Note down the relative path used

      <figure>
        <title>Sample</title>
        <mediaobject>
          <imageobject>
            <imagedata fileref="images/sample.jpg" format="JPG"/>
          </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
      </figure>

- The `build.properties` file controls what directories are copied over from the source tree to the output tree:

      # 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/**

## 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.

design

### Search

Overview design of Search mechanism.

The serching is a fully client-side implementation of querying texts for content searching. There's no server involved. So, the search queries by the users are processed by JavaScript inside the browser, and displays the matching results by comparing the query with a simplified 'index' that too resides in JavaScript. Mainly the search mechanism has two parts.

- Indexing: First we need to traverse the content in the docs folder and index the words in it. This is done by `webhelpindexer.jar` in `xsl/extentions/` folder. You can invoke it by `ant index` command from the root of webhelp of directory. The source of webhelpindexer is now moved to it's own location at `trunk/xsl-webhelpindexer/`. Checkout the Docbook trunk svn directory to get this source. Then, do your changes and recompile it by simply running `ant` command. My assumption is that it can be opened by Netbeans IDE by one click. Or if you are using IntelliJ Idea, you can simply create a new project from existing sources. Indexer has extensive support for features such as word scoring, stemming of words, and support for languages English, German, French. For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, it uses bi-gram tokenizing to break up the words (since CJK languages does not have spaces between words).

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

  - `htmlFileList.js` - This contains an array named `fl` which stores details all the files indexed by the indexer. Further, the doStem in it defines whether stemming should be used. It defaults to false.

  - `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);`

search

#### 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/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.

stemmer

Frequently Asked Questions

## FAQ

On what browsers and operating systems WebHelp has tested extensively?

We tested it with versions of most browsers including Firefox 3.x+, IE 7+, Chrome, Safari, and iPod/iPhone. The JavaScript codes are mostly jquery plugins, so you’d want to check the jquery support matrix for details.

Apart from this demo, where can I find other demos or production deployments of WebHelp?

There are four production deployments provided in WebHelp wiki currently.

When building the webhelp output, I'm getting the following error. What's the reason for this?

    [xslt] : Warning! file:/C:/Users/kasun/docbook-xsl-1.77.0/xhtml/autoidx.xsl:
                line 596: Attribute 'href' outside of element.
    [xslt] : Warning! file:/C:/Users/kasun/docbook-xsl-1.77.0/xhtml/autoidx.xsl:
                line 596: Attribute 'href' outside of element.

----

This happens if you haven't done the step 3 and 4 of webhelp build guide "Generating webhelp output" in the documentation. Basically, you need to correctly set the following folder paths.

    xslt-processor-classpath=/usr/share/java/saxon-6.5.5.jar
    xercesImpl.jar=/usr/share/java/xercesImpl.jar
    xml-apis.jar=/usr/share/java/xml-apis.jar

Does WebHelp Indexer can index HTML transformation as well?

Yes, WebHelp supports HTML transformations as well in addition to XHTML.

I need more information about webhelp-indexer. Where can I find it?

The DocBook Webhelp Indexer is based on the HTMLSearch plugin for DITA. See HTMLSearch documentation for more information.

FAQ