Is there a free Help Authoring tool available for Eclipse?

Question

I need to write on-line help (Eclipse help format) for an Eclipse plugin. I tried out the evaluation of Help Composer that comes as part of RCP Developer from Instantiations and it pretty much does what I am looking for. However at $500 per license it's way overkill and over budget for my needs.

Surely there must be some other tool for managing the help project, assembling the various files, table of contents, and editing the html documents using WYSIWYG.

Does anybody have any suggestions for what plugin(s) I should add to a basic Eclipse 3.5 install to give me full authoring capability?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I gave up looking for free since all the available tools have a lot of shortcomings.

I decided to use Adobe RoboHelp 8 since it has one of the nicest editors that I found. However, the main benefit for me has been that it automatically updates links in all pages if I rename or move a topic (which I do a lot).

When I want to generate the Eclipse Help file, I use the script that they provide.

Answer 2

For a large documentation project, we used Latex in combination with plastex. This allowed us to generate PDF, Eclipse Help and HTML from the same sources. Cross Referencing, which seems like an issue for some readers, is handled, as well as indexing and other cool stuff. Getting it to work was a bit tedious, but it was a good solution, as the documentation contained a lot of formulas.

This was an open source project, so everything is available - feel free to use and adapt as you see fit:

Result (HTML, PDF, Eclipse Help: http://handbook.event-b.org/

Code: https://sourceforge.net/p/rodin-b-sharp/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/Handbook/

Answer 3

I don't think it exists in eclipse, but try the MS one (free): Here is the info: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms670169(VS.85).aspx

Here is the download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc

Then you can convert to eclipse format: http://home.amnet.net.au/~ghannington/hh2e/hh2e-readme.html

Answer 4

I know that my solution is not entirely what you need, but you should have a look at Mylyn Wikitext .

It uses a simple markup with good editor support and is also capable of exporting to Eclipse Help format.