Including 3rd party documentation into Scribus help browser

This article is part of the Tips & Tricks series.

Installation • Usage • PDF issues • Other

Introduction

The built-in Scribus help browser provides an easy way to include your own HTML docs along with the official documentation. For a more elaborate description, how it works, refere to the featuere request 830 in the Scribus Bug Tracker.

What to do?

• Grab from somewhere a set of HTML documents, you would like to include into the Scribus help browser, e.g. some nice HOWTOs from this site or a tutorial from the Download area on the Scribus website.

• Create Table of Contents called menu.xml for your docs and save it into the same directory, where your docs are located. Your TOC should look like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <menu>
    <submenuitem text="Get Started With Scribus" file="scribustutorial1.html">
        <submenuitem text="Page 2" file="scribustutorial2.html"/>
    </submenuitem>
 </menu>

• Put the whole directory containing your HTML docs under under $prefix/share//doc/scribus-$(VERSION)/$language_abbreviation/tutorials/*, where on most systems $prefix will be /usr or /usr/local and $language_abbreviation means for example en for English.

• Launch Scribus and choose from the menu Help > Scribus manual... to start the Scribus help browser. You'll find your new HTML docs under the Tutorials section.
• If you would like to share your docs with other users, don't hesitate to upload them under the Tutorials section in the Scribus website download area.

A special case: Help files for the German doc directory

Due to an error, docs that users want to install under $installdir/share/doc/scribus-$(VERSION)/de/ in Scribus versions < 1.2.5 won't appear in the help browser without some tweaking:

• First, create a directory tutorials in the directory mentioned above.
• Download the menu.xml file from here: http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=3620 and copy it into the .../de folder.
• Continue as described above