Serna OSSO Help plugin announce

This post can be considered as a logical continue of the previous one.

I am pleased to announce my implemented vision of solution to make life easier for Maemo help/documentation authors. Since Syntext Serna WYSIWYG xml editor is free (free as beer!) and it is really crossplatform (written using Nokia/Trolltech Qt framework; currently it is avaialble for Linux, MacOS X, Windows, and even Sun Solaris), I decided to use it as a platform to create such solution.

What has been done:

1. Schema files

   I've researched sources of OSSO Help framework to get more knowledge about all available elements. Also distribution help files placed in /usr/share/osso-help/en_GB were researched to get more information about elements order. The result: DTD file was written from the scratch which allow to make elements validation and completion.

2. Stylesheets

   All visual appearance for Serna is made using XSLT Stylesheets. So, special XSLT stylesheets have been written which allow to represent OSSO help files "as is".

3. Documentation

   As it was mentioned in the previous post, there is no really good documentation about help authoring for Maemo, so some intros were written. Actually they are not so good as I want and imagine, but it is just a first step, is not it?

Plugin's homepage is http://thekondor.net/osso-help-plugin where documentation, tutorial and download links can be found. Of course, plugin is free of charge; licensed in terms of GNU Lesser GPL v3.


Some screenshots

There is how help file looks like being opened in Serna:



There is a final representation being viewed in Maemo. Impressing, right?
I hope this beta will be useful and there are ideas to improve it in the following ways:

1. Schema files
2. Visual representation (XSLT stylesheets)
3. Usability (want to use a power Serna customization to make help authoring for Maemo more easier)
4. Publishing. Make a possibility to generate PDF/HTML files directly from Serna.
   

Feedback about OSSO Help Plugin is welcome.

Stay tuned!