[Mono-dev] Creating a help system

[Michael Hutchinson]

On 10/8/06, pablosantosluac <pablosantosluac at terra.es> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> What do you use to create the online documentation?
>
> We need to format our help documentation for both Windows and Linux systems.
> What do you think is better: chm, web based help, something else?

Depends on how you're distributing it. Generally it's useful to be
able to create several types of documentation from one source. On
Windows, the VS.NET HTML Help 2.0 system is probably best (.HxS/.HxI),
though the format is closed. However, MonoDevelop uses Monodoc files.
And it's handy to have web-based docs as well.

> Tools we can use?

Mono uses the Monodoc tool, which allows you to avoid mixing your
comments in with your code:
http://mono-project.com/Monodoc
http://mono-project.com/Generating_Documentation

Free tools for consuming inline XML comments are NDoc
http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/ and Sandcastle
http://www.sandcastledocs.com/

Personally I'd use Monodoc, and write an XSLT to convert the XML into
a form that could be used by Sandcastle/NDoc/VS.NET SDK to generate
help for Windows.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com