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At work we use Sandcastle for creation of help files. I have been using SandCastleGUI for some time and I'm looking for a way to create additional pages in the help file. These pages are written in XML format called MAML. The only problem is that I couldn't find any decent editor for these file format.

I'm looking for a WYSIWYG editor to create & edit additional documentation pages.

Dror Helper
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  • This is really not an answer, but as you might see from [my question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101150/what-would-you-use-to-write-end-user-documentation-for-a-wpf-application) I have an interest in experience with MAML in general and particular MAML with regards to end user documentation. If have any experience with this, it would be great if you could provide your thoughts on your blog about using MAML for end user documentation. – tronda Sep 22 '08 at 07:25

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You could use a generic XML editor with WYSIWYG support like Oxygen or Serna. You would need a Xml Schema or DTD for MAML, I assume there is one somewhere in an SDK or such. Probably the harder part is that you would need a stylesheet that renders the XML to an display format that can be used by the editor to provide a WYSIWYG view of the document.

It works rather well for standard XML formats such as Docbook, but I don't know how easy it is to find/create the needed stylesheets for MAML. But generally there is no reason why it couldn't be done.

sth
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  • No exactly what I had in mind - I need a WYSIWYG editor to edit documents for the help, I'm not looking for an XML graphic editor – Dror Helper Mar 16 '09 at 07:45
  • Well, at least these editors give you WYSIWYG editing of the text parts of your help files that looks pretty much like the screenshots of Gustavos links. It's better than having to write everything as raw XML, but doesn't handle things like compiling it to actual help files,... – sth Mar 16 '09 at 13:37
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Finally I found a solution the good people of SandCastle Help File Builder have included an HTML to MAML converter.
There are many good HTML editorsout there - and now I can use one of them and then convert the result to MAML

Dror Helper
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Don't know if you are still looking for a solution to this, but I've been looking at help editors and ran across a codeproject article that might be useful. The article can be found at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/DocMounter_2_Sandcastle.aspx. It features an editor that might be just what you need.

WiredWiz
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