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On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Lois Patterson <loisrpatterson -at- gmail -dot- com>
wrote:
>
> I know that if you have your product documentation online, Google does a
> great deal of the work when it comes to search. In addition, it's
> relatively straightforward to implement solutions like elasticsearch. I
> understand the benefits of public, online documentation for searchability.
>
> However, I need a solution for local documentation. The infrastructure
> required to set up something like elasticsearch for a local doc system
> (essentially comprised of HTML files) seems excessive. But the search
> provided out of the box by sphinx is not satisfactory.
>
> If you are delivering local documentation, what are you using for
> high-quality search?
I guess it depends on your definition of high quality, but I convert the
entire doc set to PDF and then make an Adobe index. Customers like this
because the result links are at both the document level and the individual
hit level. When you click one, it opens the doc to the very page where this
hit is.
I make the whole set of docs and index into a zip file and give users a set
of instructions for unzipping and using the search on the .IDX file. So,
they can have it on their own machine, or I can put the (non-zipped) file
set into a dir on a file server and they can use it across the network...
Nowhere near as fancy as some options, but it works.
Bob
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