A common requirement for technical publications groups is to produce a Web-based help format that includes a table of contents pane, a search feature, and an index similar to what you get from the Microsoft HTML Help (.chm) format or Eclipse help. If the content is help for a Web application that is not exposed to the Internet or requires that the user be logged in, then it is impossible to use services like Google to add search.
Features
Sophisticated CSS-based page layout
Provides full content search of the documentation. Shows the search results with links to chunked pages, and a small description.
Search results can include brief descriptions of the target.
Stemming support for English, French, and German. Stemming support can be added for other languages by implementing a stemmer.
Support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages using code from the Lucene search engine.
Search highlighting shows where the searched term appears in the results.
Table of contents (TOC) pane with collapsible toc tree.
Auto-synchronization of content pane and TOC.
Nicely placed small forward, backward, top links
TOC and search pane implemented without the use of a frameset.
An Ant script to generate output. You can use this build file by importing it into your own or use it as a model for integrating this output format into your own build system. Alternatively, you can use this Ant script as a template for creating your own build script or you can use the Docbkx Maven plugin .