Tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial is intended to cover a basic process of Maemo help documents authoring using OSSO Help plugin and Syntext Serna WYSIWYG XML editor.

The following supposition statements have been made:

1. There is an application called MaemoFooBar for Maemo which is under active development

2. MaemoFooBar is developed by two persons:

   • Lead developer

     Main code programmer.

   • Content Author

     Writes documentation, tutorials and help for MaemoFooBar. Knows nothing about development – shares all experience from user’s points of view.

OSSO Help general idea

Help file consists of groupped content blocks. Each content block:

• Is a piece of text. Can contain any number of paragraphs, images, and so on. Good practice is when such content block is self-contained with references to the related content blocks.

  This block is called topic.

• Has a unique ID. By this ID a main application can always call to show to the user only specified topic, not all available.

  This ID is called context. One context is binded to one topic.

All topics together organize a folder.

(need to be corrected)

Case

Content author is provided by the developer with the following contexts:

help_maemofoobar_intro

Show an intro help to MaemoFooBar

help_maemofoobar_hotkeys

Show a help with available hot keys for MaemoFooBar

Task is: to create a help file from the scratch with topics binded to these contexts.

Authoring

Create an empty help file

1. Run Serna

2. Call Document -> New Document. Select OSSO Help category and select OSSO Help template, and press Ok.

3. An empty help file is created:

   

Create a named folder

As we remember before adding new topics, a named parent folder for them must be created.

1. Put cursor in Content Map to #choice element
2. Insert folder element pressing Ctrl-Enter
3. Put cursor to title element and type the text – name of the folder.

Create a topic

Topic consists of the following elements;

• Topic title
• Associated context ID
• And content itself

1. Put cursor in Content Map after title element

2. Insert topic element pressing Ctrl-Enter

3. Insert to the newly created element topictitle element and type the text – title of the topic.

4. Select a position in Content Map after topictitle element. Insert context element.

   On the dialog you will be asked to enter a name of the context setting a value of contextUID attribute:

   

5. On this step real content authoring process is begin. All elements inserted to the position after context element is what will be shown to the user.

   All text here must be wrapped to para element.

6. Our first completed topic ‘Intro’:

7. Next topic is created repeating the same steps.

See the result

In Serna

(larger: see)

On Nokia IT device

On Maemo.

Intro topic:

(larger: see)

Hot keys topic:

(larger: see)