Helpify, the Omni Help Emitter
posted by William on 10.02.08 @ 3:46 pm
Hello, friends. One of my jobs here at Omni is creating our documentation, including onscreen help in the Apple Help Book format. Over the years I have been building a Python tool that turns specially-formatted OmniOutliner 3 files into proper help books, which can then be dropped into an app. This is pretty useful for “single-sourcing” our help and manuals. If you, too, would like to author your help in OmniOutliner, with automatic formatting, indexing, and navigation, you may want to try it out.
The included outline acts as documentation and as a starting template. If you have any feedback, or you’d like to help improve my decidedly un-engineer-like code, please let me know at helpify at omni group dot com.
Update: Version 1.1, uploaded October 31, 2008, includes code cleanup, a company web site variable, and the ability to use Helpify as a module for other Python scripts. Many thanks go to Matteo Rattotti of Shiny Frog for his feedback and patience.
Update: Version 1.2, uploaded November 18, 2008, includes a bit more cleanup and much better handling of Unicode throughout the source outline. Thanks to Markus Müller of MindNode for his feedback and patience.
[...] Helpify, the Omni Help Emitter - Tool to build Helpbook files from OmniOutliner documents. [...]
By A Fresh Cup » Blog Archive » Double Shot #305 on 10.03.08 7:57 am
Awesome.
By Jesper on 10.03.08 11:20 am
[...] Helpify, the Omni Help Emitter. Hello, friends. One of my jobs here at Omni is creating our documentation, including onscreen help in the Apple Help Book format. Over the years I have been building a Python tool that turns specially-formatted OmniOutliner 3 files into proper help books, which can then be dropped into an app. This is pretty useful for “single-sourcing” our help and manuals. If you, too, would like to author your help in OmniOutliner, with automatic formatting, indexing, and navigation, you may want to try it out. [The Omni Mouth] [...]
By Ken’s Weblog » Blog Archive » Interesting documentation tool on 10.03.08 12:55 pm
[...] in OmniOutliner and converting the data into the Apple Help Book format. William has created a very useful tool for us developers out there. Thank you very much. Now you really don’t have an excuse why [...]
By » Writing Apple Help Books With Less Pain « Macs in Media Archiv on 10.03.08 1:43 pm
Is it possible for ordinary users to use OmniOutliner and this script to create our own Mac OS X and application Help files? I’ve always thought it would be great if end users could do this, and consolidate my own computer user notes files…
By George on 10.05.08 8:16 pm
[...] Van Hecke, Omni Group’s User Experience Lead has released Helpify, a Python script that turns specially-formatted OmniOutliner files into Apple Help [...]
By Building Apple Help with OmniOutliner at infotexture on 10.09.08 1:36 am
George, I suppose you could create your own help books and view them in a web browser. But in order for them to appear in Help Viewer, they’ll need to be registered normally by an actual application.
By wvh on 10.09.08 6:35 pm