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I'm currently trying to find a documentation (user guide) system that would have following features:
documentation files in text mode (so svn could diff/merge it)
possibility to use images, table, cross-references and table of
contents
export to pdf (or .doc/.odt) that would support cross-references
I tried markdown for documentation source files and pandoc for pdf export but markdown does not support tables.
I really appreciate any help you can provide.
We use Sphinx for this scenario.
It can generate html, pdf and some other formats from reStructuredText Files.
And have a look at list-table when you want to add complex tables.
I use the TeX for electonic and printable documentation
https://tex.stackexchange.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
Probably the most commonly used solution set for documentation is XML in Docbook or DITA. You can certainly manage those in SVN as well as perform diffs. They both provide processing toolchains with many output types include PDF through XSL FO.
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I've use javadoc, as well as a variety of different XML based doc-generation systems. Javadoc is fine, XML based doc-generators are hideous, with the XML getting all over the comments and turning the comments into soup.
I've looked at markdown, and the fact that it is easily parseable into structured data but also super human-readable would make it perfect for in-code comments, where the readability of both the docs and the plaintext is of utmost importance.
Are there any markdown based doc-generators out there already? Is there any reason why it wouldn't work which I don't know of?
There exits some Markdown-Doclets (f.ex. http://www.richardnichols.net/open-source/markdown-doclet/ ) which can be used with JavaDoc.
Maybe you are also interested in the famous doxygen tool. It doesn't use Markdown but the format is very similar to it (f. ex. unordered lists with - etc.).
You may try mdoc to generate Markdown based documentation. It reads all the .md files and produces HTML based documentation. It also creates a TOC. Check it out.
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Is there a free way to read PDF files through VBA to extract basic text content? I need to automate a weekly data acquisition process at my company where data is contained in PDF files (which are updated weekly by the data provider). Also, is there a reference I can look into to understand the file structure (DOM?) of a PDF?
Adobe's PDF reference is online here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html
I'm not sure about the best way to read PDFs from VBA directly, but if you can call an external Java or C# program, then I would recommend using iText for basic text extraction.
EDIT: I should maybe mention that Adobe's PDF reference is an 800 page beast. I found that it's good for looking up answers to particular questions (eg, storing widths of embedded truetype fonts), but it may not be a good place to start. For that, reading through the iText book helped me to get started on the format.
The IText book contains lots of worked examples for general PDF tasks and lots of background info to help you understand PDF files. It more than pays for itself very quickly!
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I'm a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none programmer and as I jump around languages, quality consistent documentation is becoming more and more important to me. I've recently been using Doxygen, but Wikipedia reveals the usual ridiculous list of similar frameworks.
What is your favorite documentation generator and why? (Vote where you agree to keep it tidy!)
I use different files written in MediaWiki MarkUp, since this is easy to learn for everyone. I convert this to HTML and a CHM file, and to LaTeX for the PDF documentation.
This was the most painless way for me to generate Online documentation AND printable documentation in one strike with a simple way of input.
The tools I use are org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext with a custom DocumentBuilder for LaTeX, the Microsoft Help compiler (which sadly only runs on windows), and a LaTeX distribution.
EDIT: I managed to get the Microsoft Help compiler running with Wine, so my Linux build server is now able to create the whole documentation automatically.
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At work we use Sandcastle for creation of help files. I have been using SandCastleGUI for some time and I'm looking for a way to create additional pages in the help file.
These pages are written in XML format called MAML.
The only problem is that I couldn't find any decent editor for these file format.
I'm looking for a WYSIWYG editor to create & edit additional documentation pages.
You could use a generic XML editor with WYSIWYG support like Oxygen or Serna. You would need a Xml Schema or DTD for MAML, I assume there is one somewhere in an SDK or such. Probably the harder part is that you would need a stylesheet that renders the XML to an display format that can be used by the editor to provide a WYSIWYG view of the document.
It works rather well for standard XML formats such as Docbook, but I don't know how easy it is to find/create the needed stylesheets for MAML. But generally there is no reason why it couldn't be done.
Finally I found a solution the good people of SandCastle Help File Builder have included an HTML to MAML converter.
There are many good HTML editorsout there - and now I can use one of them and then convert the result to MAML
Don't know if you are still looking for a solution to this, but I've been looking at help editors and ran across a codeproject article that might be useful. The article can be found at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/DocMounter_2_Sandcastle.aspx. It features an editor that might be just what you need.
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I want to write a tool that helps me search pdf/chm/djvu files in linux. Any pointers on how to go about it?
The major problem is reading/importing data from all these files. Can this be done with C and shell scripting?
Tracker ships with Ubuntu 8.04 -- it was a significant switch from Beagle which users believed was too resource (CPU) intensive and didn't yield good enough results. It indexes both pdf and chm and according to this bug report it also indexes djvu.
Note that djvu is an image compression format (optimized to compress 'pictures of text', typically the results of scanning). As such, you won't be able to search for text, except in the metadata -this is what the link sent by cdleary refers to-, or if you first use OCR on the document to convert it into text.
The same is true for PDFs which content are scanned articles/books.
How about a plugin for Beagle ?
It already searches PDFs but you can add other file types.
Here is the relevant wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_(software)