Re: Search options for local documentation sets

[Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

I didn't know that JQuery had any kind of offline search capability, I 
think of it as an easier way to make JavaScript/CSS UI widgets. Web 
developers don't usually care about freaky stuff like generating a 
JavaScipt-based search that runs on a local drive outside of a web server.

If your customers are on Windows you could use Microsoft .chm files, 
generated by the free HTML Help Workshop. It could be based on your HTML 
files that you already have. It would take a bit of fiddling to set up. 
chm is ancient, long unsupported by MS, but it generates a really snappy 
binary full-text search for your help system. It has other problems too, 
but chm files were the greatest for quick performance and have not been 
equaled by anything since.

If that won't work, and your customers have the Java runtime available, 
you might look at JavaHelp, which I think can be compiled similar to chm 
files. It's pretty old though.

You might ask the Sphinx community what they think you should do. I'm 
sure there are mailing lists or other forums where you could ask 
questions about this. Probably some clever programmer has come up with 
something they would share with you. https://readthedocs.org/ might 
help, they are Sphinx based I think.

I've had this same problem with a client or two, but I never quite had 
to solve it yet. There are bits and pieces out there that I'm sure you 
could find, I think you might have to put them together yourself or with 
the help of some kind of programmer.

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://markgiffin.com/


On 7/14/2016 12:33 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote: