OmniHelp Design Report


OmniHelp is an open-source, cross-platform system for displaying Help information in a manner similar to that used by WinHelp and HTML Help systems, with support for context-sensitive Help and modular Help projects. This document describes OmniHelp Version 0.8 design and formats.

OmniHelp is licensed under the LGPL, which permits its use in commercial products as long as OmniHelp source code, including all modifications, is made available to users. All OmniHelp development work to date has been contributed by Jeremy H. Griffith, Carolyn Stallard, and other staff of Omni Systems, Inc., with the support of some Mif2Go users. Hopefully other vendors will choose to participate in OmniHelp development work. The OmniHelp project is officially hosted on SourceForge, from which the current version of this paper, and all required files, are available for download (as well as on omsys.com).

The OmniHelp viewer consists of a set of HTML and JavaScript files that present the Help content in a tri-pane format, using any browser that meets the following criteria:

complies with minimum Web standards

supports framesets

supports basic CSS1.

Supported browsers include NN4+ and IE4+. Help content is in HTML and JavaScript (data) files.

So far, the only Help Authoring Tool (HAT) that supports OmniHelp is Omni Systems Mif2Go, which produces content and data files from FrameMaker documents. (Mif2Go also supports many other Help formats, as well as XML, XHTML, and Word RTF, from FrameMaker 5.5, 6, and 7.x on any Windows platform.)