JavaHelp

Sun Microsystem's JavaHelp™ online documentation system can be used to provide help for Java-based applications. The best source of information on JavaHelp is Sun's website http://java.sun.com/products/javahelp/. They offer a JavaHelp User's Guide, an FAQ, and other documentation.

The standard DocBook XSL distribution includes customized stylesheets that can generate JavaHelp files from DocBook XML documents. The stylesheets are located in the javahelp subdirectory of the distribution. You can use one of the following stylesheet files with your favorite XSLT processor:

javahelp.xsl

The main stylesheet file for generating JavaHelp output.

profile-javahelp.xsl

A further customization that supports profiling to filter your DocBook XSL files before generating output.

You use these stylesheets as you would the regular chunking DocBook XSL stylesheets. For example:

xsltproc \
    --stringparam  base.dir  helpfiles/  \
    --stringparam  use.id.as.filename  1 \
    javahelp/javahelp.xsl \
    myfile.xml

Since javahelp.xsl is based on chunk.xsl, it has all the same default settings, and accepts all the same parameters for changing those defaults. Since the preceding command example does not change the chunking level, it chunks on sect1 (and equivalent first-level section), but not the first one in each chapter.

The javahelp.xsl stylesheet also generates the support files needed for JavaHelp:

jhelpset.hs

HelpSet file that defines the components of your help application.

jhelptoc.xml

JavaHelp table of contents file.

jhelpmap.jhm

JavaHelp Map file that maps id values to HTML files.

jhelpidx.xml

A JavaHelp index,. The index is empty unless your document has indexterm elements.