Workflow for turning Confluence wiki content into hardcopy/web user manual? [closed]

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开发者_JAVA技巧

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The company I work for has started using Confluence for documenting software development and the associated processes. We are looking into using content created on the wiki to create a user manual, as both a PDF for hardcopy and HTML for a web based manual. I was wondering if anybody had any suggestions for this specific workflow?

Cheers.

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First of all, I think the strong point in using Confluence is that it is online and changeable by a lot of people simultaneously. So by printing that out, you loose some of the strong points here.

Confluence provides some mechanism out-of-the-box, and you should check if they are sufficient for you.

So do the following:

1. Take an existing (small) wiki space and export that wiki space into HTML and PDF. See the menu entries in Browse > Advanced > HTML Export and PDF Export
2. There are options which pages to include (hierarchically) or not.
3. If you want to tune it, there are some options in Browse > Space Admin > PDF Layout and PDF Stylesheet (never tried that).
4. For HTML you may tune of course first the stylesheets exported by Confluence.
5. If that is not sufficient, there may be a way to build an export for yourself by using Browse > Advanced > XML Export and use some other technology to export in the form you want to have it.

If this first experiment is sufficient, the workflow is straight forward and similar to the four points above. If not, the building of an own exporter in using the XML format may be a lot of work to do.

One more point: The per-requisit for all that is that the content that you want to publish lives in exactly one space. So you may have to tune your space by including or excluding pages

I had the following experience in the past ...

• I found no way to tune the order of the pages in the export (PDF).
• The layout of PDF was strange (even for one wiki page), but that may have changed in the meanwhile. For a lecture I give (creating the content in Confluence), I print it out by a combination of CSS, print preview in Opera and collecting the PDFs in the right order.
• The HTML format was ok, and if was pretty easy to hide things that I did not want to show in the HTML version (eg. .hide { display: none; }.

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The Confluence User guide is the best resource that I've found regarding how to create technical documentation:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Developing+Technical+Documentation+on+Confluence+Wiki

Basically an overview of how Atlassian dogfoods their own product to create its documentation (very self referential circle).