Re: Lenya suitable as Docbook Help Authoring Tool?

Hi Jürgen,

Am 29.12.09 21:09, schrieb Juergen Weber:
> I am looking into Lenya as Help Authoring Tool. So far installation proved
> easy, learning was quick. An avantage for help authoring is that users
> cannot enter fancy styles and can use only what the editor allows.
>
> Idea is to create help using the CMS, convert to docbook and then via XSL to
> Eclipse help.

with Lenya I'd recommend using DocBook as the content format. The 
University of Zurich uses an XML language which AFAIK is loosely based 
on DocBook for e-learning contents:

http://elml.ch/website/en/html/tools_lenya.html

This is based on Lenya 1.2, but might suffice as a proof of concept.


> As I understand, Lenya is Cocoon based, so content is there in XML. How do
> you get it? By adressing content directly on the file system? Where is it?
> Or is there an API in the web app?

There is an API in the web app:

http://lenya.apache.org/docu20/concepts/documents.html


> Has anybody managed to transform Lenya XML to docbook?

Since Lenya can be used to manage arbitrary XML content formats, there 
is no standard "Lenya XML". You can directly use DocBook as your content 
format.


> Similar thing, how do you get PDF output for users? This question appears
> several times on the list, but no good answer, is there?

You could define a format for your resource type, based on a 
Docbook-to-XSL-FO stylesheet. See this page for more information:

http://lenya.apache.org/docu20/reference/resource-types.html#N10126

HTH,

-- Andreas


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Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01