Mylyn Docs and how it can be a powerful tool

his talk will be about documentation. Not the tedious bit (writing), but how to use the Eclipse based tools for it (exciting). I will show the editors within Eclipse and how to continously build common publication formats, such as Eclipse Help, EPUB and PDF from one single source and that’s even including the table of contents. This can be done as part of your build script, with the aid of a Maven plug-in or Ant. I will also show how you can properly include LaTeX formuals into your EPUBs with no cheating. Did you know you can use Mylyn Docs to convert HTML into any of the supported markup formats, such as Textile and Confluence. I’ll show you how.

Some of these tools have a powerful API. For the sake of demonstration I will show how you can take the programming book you just bought, the one with the awful formatting, and improve it using the Mylyn Docs EPUB API with just a few lines of Java code and some CSS.

I’ll save a few minutes for discussing the future of the Mylyn Docs. What do you want from this little gem of Eclipse projects? Maybe you can contribute or even become a committer?

Transcript

1. Mylyn Docs …and how it can be a powerful tool Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
2. About me Torkild Ulvøy Resheim * Consultant & Senior Software Developer at Itema AS * Committer at Mylyn Docs, Mylyn Builds and Orbit * Helps out at the Eclipse Science Working Group torkildr on Twitter tur@itema.no http://www.itema.no Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
3. About the project "The scope of the Mylyn Docs project is Eclipse-based access to documentation systems such as Wikis and other portals." 4 Started from Mylyn WikiText component in August 2008 4 18 contributors and committers 4 137k lines of code Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
4. Components 4 WikiText 4 Wikitext Editor 4 ANT and Maven tasks 4 Extensible Java API 4 EPUB 4 Ant task (Maven in the works) 4 Wizard for WikiText to EPUB 4 Java API Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
5. Supported dialects 4 Confluence 4 Mediawiki 4 Textile 4 Commonmark 4 Markdown 4 TracWiki 4 TWiki Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
6. Why use Mylyn Docs? "First of all thank you HUGELY for WikiText. I've used it to create documentation to go along with the software I'm sending to the ISS for astronauts to use. Very cool." — Tamar Cohen, NASA, June 2012 Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
7. Using Mylyn Docs The Java API Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
8. As a user I want to read my documentation in PDF and EPUB 4 Use Mylyn Docs to generate all formats 4 Convert from MarkDown to HTML and assemble EPUB 4 And I want my equations to look good! 4 Convert from MarkDown to XSL:FO and generate PDF 4 Add a cover page 4 Generate table of contents Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
9. As a developer I want to read all my coding books with pretty formatting 4 The coding book I just bought has bad formatting and I find it hard to read. 4 Use Mylyn Docs tools to unpack the book 4 Add an improved CSS file 4 Modify the source code listings 4 Add a new page 4 Copy modified book to iPad and smile! ! Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
10. Summary Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
11. Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS
12. See: https://github.com/turesheim/ mylyn-docs-examples Copyright © 2015 Torkild U. Resheim, Itema AS