May 20 Meeting Recap: A Brief Introduction to Eclipse

by Evan Jones

Many of you may have had experience making help files before, whether it be with RoboHelp or with HTML. Fei Min Lorente of ON Semiconductor, however, presented us with a fresh approach to writing user assistance files by introducing a relatively new program called Eclipse.

What is Eclipse? Well, it's an open-source (read: free) software and community. Many companies, from the giants to small start-ups, use it to develop software products, to build programs faster, customize it to sell to their customers and to write plug-ins for others to use in Eclipse.

Since the components of the Eclipse program are quite overwhelming, where exactly does the Technical Writer fit into all this? Fei Min simplifies this problem by demonstrating that the technical communicator plays a part in Eclipse by providing User Assistance and understanding how the customers can access information. For example, Eclipse provides users with a full-text search that includes a customizable search scope, "breadcrumbs" and other navigation aids, bookmarks and a help view, as well as the ability to print a selected topic or include subtopics.

There are some things to consider before building a help file with Eclipse:

• Whether to provide the help integrated with the Eclipse-based product, as a standalone Eclipse installation, or over the Web as an infocenter.
• If the help is integrated, whether the documentation plug-in should be with the main Eclipse installation or separate.
• Determine plug-in naming conventions and versioning control.
• Determine the folder structure of help files.

Eclipse is growing in use worldwide, but it does have advantages and disadvantages. Since Eclipse is an open-source program, it means that documentation is incomplete or difficult to understand and the bugs are fixed slowly. On the flip side, however, there is an active development community, there are regular new releases and it makes a great free starting point for software development.

This same presentation will be delivered at the STC international conference in Philadelphia and the slides have been uploaded to the conference web site. This is available on the STC website at: http://www.stc.org/55thConf/sessions/sessionMaterials01.asp.

Door Prize

This evening's door prize was provided by The Economical Insurance Group and won by Roger Shuttleworth.