Re: PostgreSQL 8.0.0 documentation for the MacOS X Help Viewer

Hi Georges,

I looked into doing this for pgEdit on the Mac, but I kept having
stupid little problems on the Mac getting the help viewer to work right
when interacting with my application. The main reason to do this over
just using the plain HTML version is to get the indexing. With the new
indexing features coming soon in 10.4, I'm not sure there will be much
advantage.

I'm not trying to discourage you in any way from doing this, just
venting a bit that I have had problems every time I have tried to
integrate Apple Help in an application. Apple even wrote a separate
help viewer for XCode. It is much better for technical documentation;
hopefully it will eventually show up in Apple Help.

On Feb 5, 2005, at 9:21 AM, Georges Martin wrote:

> As the PostgreSQL documentation source is written using DocBook[3],
> the best way
> to get it packaged for the Apple Help Viewer would be to:
>
> 1. create a "DocBook to Apple Help" XSLT stylesheet for the "Modular
> DocBook
> HTML Stylesheet" [4][5];

I think PostgreSQL uses DocBook SGML/DSSSL style sheets and not the
XML/XSL variant. DSSSL is a Lisp-like syntax (which is *much* better in
my opinion :) instead of XML. Unfortunately, all new development is
moving forward on the XML side so this reduces the motivation for
spending a great deal of time learning DSSSL.

http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/documentation/reference/html/
ch04.html#AEN4448

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL