Single-Source Help System

Over the course of creating help systems for multiple clients, Freelock, LLC developed a set of scripts that manage browse sequences, tables of contents, and cross-references for help systems.

The framework consisted of a set of templates and scripts, a single XML file containing the entire content structure, and individual text files containing the help content. This framework was integrated with the output from Doxygen (an API extraction documentation tool).

It was capable of displaying topics either in a frame set or on a single page, and users could see all topics within a "book" on a single web page or even dump the entire help system into one (long!) web page for easy import into Word or FrameMaker.

And besides coding the help system, Freelock, LLC wrote the content and created many of the graphics.