Over the course of creating help systems for multiple clients, Freelock, LLC has developed a set of scripts that manage browse sequences, tables of contents, and cross-references for help systems.

The framework consists of a set of templates and scripts, a single XML file containing the entire content structure, and individual text files containing the help content. This framework has been integrated with the output from Doxygen (an API extraction documentation tool).

It is capable of displaying topics either in a frame set or on a single page, and users can see all topics within a "book" on a single web page, or even dump the entire help system into one (long!) web page for easy import into Word or FrameMaker.

And, besides coding the help system, Freelock, LLC wrote the content and created many of the graphics.

3-pane help system, with integrated browse sequence, table of contents, and single-sourcing: