The Eclipse help system is an extremely valuable tool that seems to intimidate new users. This post is intended to cover some of the very basics about how to troubleshoot your plugins in an Eclipse help system. Continue reading
Eclipse documentation plug-ins can contain Java for creating dynamic content. You can extend the Eclipse help system by taking advantage of the org.eclipse.help.contentProducer extension point. The examples in this article demonstrate how to create a simple template that is parsed at run time to display dynamic text.
Links can be painful to deal with in help systems especially in multi-author environments or with larger numbers of topics. Maintaining links over time can also be difficult. If you are authoring your help in DITA and using relationship tables, you might find they aren’t as easy to maintain as many claim. The Eclipse help system can make link validation difficult due to its frameset and difficulty for most link checkers to find all of your pages. Continue reading