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Since we moved PDT help contents from within plugin to the PDT website, now help search in Eclipse Help doesn't work. User has to manually browse through the topics. :-(
FWIW, a number of projects do "Crowdsource" their help content on the Web as a Wiki, but then convert into offline content in a plugin at release time. I think that this is a good model of operation (eg Linuxtools and Mylyn work that way AFAIK). I don't quite understand the argument of trying to make the docs plugin more lightweight by removing content. Physical Megabytes on a hard drive don't hurt anybody these days. But a lack of help search capability does.
We found package size to be a big problem for us. Users were seeing EclipsePDT (150M), B (80M), C (40M) and kept asking us: "hey this eclipse pdt takes twice as much MB and has no more features than B".. So we had to be very aggressive about the package size. By moving help to web we saved 20M of our product so we thought that it must be good to PDT as well. I agree it killed eclipse help search, but now people search in google. I thought that maybe we could fix this by getting the docs snapshot during the build and generating an index from it. But now I'm wondering whether you're more interested in having working search index or offline help.
If wiki is not an option [1], maybe better, could be: 1. Clean up - only html, shared css, no more js 2. Follow Eclipse Documentation Guideless 3. Minimize images 4. Update documentation After this we can deliver usable documentation into 3.3.1 and help.eclipse.org ;) [1] - https://wiki.eclipse.org/DocumentationGuidelines/Example
@Jacek what you think about this?
From what I see, help folder on our website takes 11M. Compressed goes down to 7M. Out of that (uncompressed) 7M is png files, 2.6M is html, JS is only 300k, jpg's are only 380k. Html/js compresses fairly well so it's clear that png files take most of size. Png files are all small few kb screenshots, but the number of them (328) makes the total size big. I wouldn't downsize them, and I'm not sure if there could be any better compression applied without loosing quality. We could try put just html help in plugin, but link to images on the web. Or check if it's possible to only bundle pregenerated help search index referring online docs. Re your ideas: 1. given above, I don't see how cleanup would help reduce size. 2. sure, we could follow eclipse guidelines, if there were anybody willing to spend time on the docs. 3. if you know how do compress pngs without downsizing them and reducing quality, then yes. 4. sure, if there's anybody willing to!
I reduced all png's by tinypng. Now, uncompressed help have 5.2M, compressed 3.3M. Hope this is acceptable.
We plan to convert our help to markdown, generate html version while build and attach them into help plugin.
Initial patch with converted content: https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/34783/
Merged: https://git.eclipse.org/c/pdt/org.eclipse.pdt.git/commit/?id=f020febef626854f58887c4e4bd54c88f55ae212 Help is again part of PDT package.
PDT Help search works now. Closing
