How to generate Eclipse Help from RoboHelp

What is Eclipse Help?

Eclipse platform has an in-built documentation which can be accessed from Help -> Help Contents. This documentation contains a list of “Help Systems” or “Books” for several plug-ins installed on the machine. Each help system contains a bunch of HTML files with an XML based table of contents (TOC) referring those files and plugin.xml file (file required by Eclipse to display the help).

A sample help system:

How would RoboHelp make your work easier?

RoboHelp provides a simple way to publish Eclipse Help. It would create all the necessary files required to generate the Help System. Here is how you should proceed for creating Eclipse Help from RoboHelp 8:-

1. Go to Tools->Options: Check flag “Convert RoboHelp edited topics to HTML”

2. Generate WebHelp SSL

3. If you have Eclipse already installed, create a folder say “MyHelpPlugin” under plugins folder of Eclipse (its under Eclipse installed folder) else create a new folder to dump output into it.

4. Open Scripts Explorer pod, View->Pods->Script Explorer

5. Run the Script “EclipseHelp.jsx”

6. Select the generated webhelp SSL folder i.e. under !SSL!

7. Click Ok

8. In Select Eclipse Plugin directory, select the folder created in Step 3.

Caution: Contents of the folder would be deleted, so double-check the folder selected.

9. Click Ok

10. In “Describe plugin.xml file” dialog, specify the name of Help and provider name

11. Click Ok

12. View help in Eclipse by Help -> Help Contents

And you should be able to view your Help as a Book in Eclipse..!!!

You can also download updated script file from here.

To update, perform the following steps:

1. Open Scripts Explorer pod, View->Pods->Script Explorer.
2. Right-click on “EclipseHelp.jsx”.
3. Click on “properties”
4. Click on “Open Folder”
5. Save the download script file to this location.

Drop a comment for any suggestion and how do you want this feature to work natively in RoboHelp 9.

Thanks
Siddharth Sodhani
RH Engineering TEAM