Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 11:37 am Post subject: help files
problem: converting from OO.o specific help file format (XML) to Apple Help file format (HTML3.2)
solution: ask the web programmer to do it (that's me)
**
last night i started working on this project. i wrote the perl script to transverse the help files and alter them, creating a mirror directory of the new files. (need to add routine to skip non-XML files, like images)
next step is to translate XML tags and styles into basic HTML.
following that, additional tags specific to Apple Help to be added. (this will be the next level detail of previous step) will make a nifty neooffice help start page.
following that, following that, will be to go through all files and check them, first for functionality (did you get your scripts right?) then for information (but i don't have a start menu!).
then poof! it will be ready. time for integration into neooffice.
will update with the excitement as it comes.
-jake
extra stuff: change pictures from windows machines to Macs.
Tested the alteration routines I wrote on some actualy files, debugged as necassary. Starting adding in real changes.
The help files stored link information in separate file, so I wrote a script to parse the .tree files and turn the information into HTML links stored in a hash. when i am awake i'll figure out why my while loop isn't working.
Am slowly (or quickly, depending on POV) remembering regular expressions.
Need to do next:
write routine to swap xml links with html links
routine to change the meta information from xml into title and meta tags
add in formatting
so both parts worked individually, one program went through an entire structure and made links in a mirror folder, the second took a file and converted it (mostly) from XML to HTML
combining them has not worked so nicely. mostly i have thought of creative explicatives, then got distraced with iMovie.
i did, however, get the first link file to work. the XML links were just ID numbers stored in secondary files (*.tree). perl program runs through each file and converts them to a single file with a hash
%link{ID#} = "HTML link"
found that link information is also in a second type of file, need to write the regexp to pull those too (because of course they are different).
so both parts worked individually, one program went through an entire structure and made links in a mirror folder, the second took a file and converted it (mostly) from XML to HTML
combining them has not worked so nicely. mostly i have thought of creative explicatives, then got distraced with iMovie.
i did, however, get the first link file to work. the XML links were just ID numbers stored in secondary files (*.tree). perl program runs through each file and converts them to a single file with a hash
%link{ID#} = "HTML link"
found that link information is also in a second type of file, need to write the regexp to pull those too (because of course they are different).
so both parts worked individually, one program went through an entire structure and made links in a mirror folder, the second took a file and converted it (mostly) from XML to HTML
combining them has not worked so nicely. mostly i have thought of creative explicatives, then got distraced with iMovie.
i did, however, get the first link file to work. the XML links were just ID numbers stored in secondary files (*.tree). perl program runs through each file and converts them to a single file with a hash
%link{ID#} = "HTML link"
found that link information is also in a second type of file, need to write the regexp to pull those too (because of course they are different).
so both parts worked individually, one program went through an entire structure and made links in a mirror folder, the second took a file and converted it (mostly) from XML to HTML
combining them has not worked so nicely. mostly i have thought of creative explicatives, then got distraced with iMovie.
i did, however, get the first link file to work. the XML links were just ID numbers stored in secondary files (*.tree). perl program runs through each file and converts them to a single file with a hash
%link{ID#} = "HTML link"
found that link information is also in a second type of file, need to write the regexp to pull those too (because of course they are different).
so both parts worked individually, one program went through an entire structure and made links in a mirror folder, the second took a file and converted it (mostly) from XML to HTML
combining them has not worked so nicely. mostly i have thought of creative explicatives, then got distraced with iMovie.
i did, however, get the first link file to work. the XML links were just ID numbers stored in secondary files (*.tree). perl program runs through each file and converts them to a single file with a hash
%link{ID#} = "HTML link"
found that link information is also in a second type of file, need to write the regexp to pull those too (because of course they are different).
[quote="Anonymous"][quote="Anonymous"][quote="jakeOSX"]so both parts worked individually, one program went through an entire structure and made links in a mirror folder, the second took a file and converted it (mostly) from XML to HTML
combining them has not worked so nicely. mostly i have thought of creative explicatives, then got distraced with iMovie.
i did, however, get the first link file to work. the XML links were just ID numbers stored in secondary files (*.tree). perl program runs through each file and converts them to a single file with a hash
%link{ID#} = "HTML link"
found that link information is also in a second type of file, need to write the regexp to pull those too (because of course they are different).
This is a bit off-topic, but I keep thinking that at some point it would be nice to be able to have a script or some other tool to run all of the help files for each language through that would search and replace all of those damn "Ctrl" and "Control" key sequences with "Command" and replace all of the "Meta" key sequences with "Control".
The OOo doc writers used to put a conditional flag in the XML help files but the stopped doing that after OOo 1.0.3.
Would it be possible to do this "Ctrl/Control" replacement in only the XML files? I ask because there is in sudden interest in releasing Neo/J language packs with the localized help files. If I create these language packs, it would be cool to be able to do the replacements in the XML help beforehand.
If it helps, here is how the conditionalize in the XML help files used to be in OOo 1.0.3:
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