Shortly after the well-received release of iChm 1.1.1, Robin Lu has responded to popular demand and updated his CHM Reader for Mac OS X with support for indexes.
The sidebar now includes a small popup menu (shown at left) which toggles the sidebar to display either the table of contents or the index.
Congratulations to Robin for listening to users and reacting so quickly!
With the new index feature, Sparkle-based application updates and the tag-powered bookmarking system mentioned earlier, iChm is certainly the best CHM viewer available for Mac.
Robin Lu has released iChm, a Cocoa-based CHM Reader for Mac OS X with Webkit rendering, a slick tabbed interface and a bookmark system that not only allows you to store links to favorite topics in the current file, but also keeps track of your bookmarks across multiple files like in a regular Web browser.
When you bookmark a topic, you can assign tags which allow you to quickly access topics in any CHM file based on the keywords you have specified.
While the concept of tagging is hardly new, the feature is unique to CHM viewers on the Mac, and can be especially useful for help developers looking for a simple means of flagging open issues in topics—just add a FIXME tag to keep track of those pesky output bugs while you tweak your WebWorks stationery.
Unfortunately, iChm shares a shortcoming with many other Mac CHM viewers: the current version (1.1.1) offers no support for the index, which is an essential component of any well-built help system. With a little luck and a bit of persuasion, perhaps Robin can be convinced to add this feature in a later version.
It wouldn’t take much to make this the best CHM viewer available on the Mac—so many of the others were apparently released as one-hit wonders and have not been actively maintained in years.
2008-08-27 Update: Version 1.2 now includes index support.
2008-09-04 Update: Version 1.3 now allows you to search the index.
Recently, a client asked for assistance in setting up the RenderX XEP processor for use with the oXygen XML editor on Mac OS X. XEP is an XSL FO processor that can be integrated with oXygen to transform DITA maps to PDF via the PDF2 transformation scenario.
The steps below describe the basic setup, and while the output location is project-specific, the rest should be essentially the same in any environment.
Install XEP (for example, to /Applications/RenderX-XEP)
Point oXygen to XEP executable in oXygen prefs:
XML > XSLT-FO-XQuery > FO Processors (Use the Browse button)
Create/verify configuration of PDF2 transformation scenario in oXygen:
Open a DITA map file & select Configure Transformation Scenario from the DITA Maps menu.
Create new scenario, select PDF2 - Idiom FO Plugin as transformation type
In the Edit DITA Scenario dialog:
- On the FO Processor tab, select XEP from the Processor list.
- On the Parameters tab, set:
args.input to ${cf}dita.dir to ${frameworksDir}/dita/DITA-OT- (other parameters optional)
- Leave the default settings on the Filters tab.
- On the Advanced tab, set:
- Custom build file to
${frameworksDir}/dita/DITA-OT/build.xml
- Java Home to
Default, such as
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
- On the Output tab, set:
- Base directory to
${cfd}
- Temp directory to a subfolder of output location, such as
…
/documentation/output/temp
- Output folder to a subfolder of SVN documentation checkout location
such as …
documentation/output/pdf2
- Click OK to save settings.
Click Transform now to create a PDF of the current DITA map.
David over at Geeks are Sexy has a nice tutorial on keeping WordPress installations current by using Subversion to check out the latest code directly from the Automattic repository.
David’s instructions are much more detailed than the brief steps provided on the WordPress site, and also describe how to check out stable WordPress versions as opposed to the latest bleeding-edge code from trunk, and how to switch an established blog to Subversion to facilitate future updates.
(Essentially, you check out a working copy to your webserver via SSH and reconfigure the fresh install to use your existing database content—worked here quite nicely.)