Dude, Where's My Manual?

a-foton » Dude, Where’s My Manual?

a-foton » Dude, Where’s My Manual? — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:25:06 GMT

PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/2008/07/dude-wheres-my-manual/

re: Dude, Where's My Manual?

JeremyG — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:04:53 GMT

Ok, we need someone who's a wizard with PowerShell and Word to tweak this script to apply additional Styles to the sub-sections of the the about files.

For example, this script already applies "heading 1" to the title of each document.

You should be able to apply the same type of styles to other sections. Such as:

"sub-headings" = word: heading 2

"paragraph text" = word: normal

"code samples" = word: emphasis

Should be pretty easy to do, since all the sections seem to be uniformly indented. However, my wife will kill me if I spend the next several hours figuring out the in's-and-out's of Word formatting code.

Someone who's a regular-expression wizard might even be able to do some fancy formatting with the "fixed width tables" (ie, where the document describes the available operators). Though that would take some real work since it would involve back-tracking to prior lines once you "discover" a table.

re: Dude, Where's My Manual?

Andrea Tedeschi — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:59:44 GMT

PingBack from http://www.andreatedeschi.com/2008/07/generating-powershell-help-in-ms-word.html

Other help options

Hal Rottenberg — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:03:27 GMT

I actually greatly prefer the HTML or compiled help versions floating around on the 'net. A "flat" word doc is useless to me because this is reference material, not a book meant to be read straight through.

Try these out:

new-htmlhelp: http://tinyurl.com/5c326o

PS Graphical Help (v1) http://tinyurl.com/63fn4v

PS Graphical Help (v2) http://tinyurl.com/5a2x3u

Also, most if not all of the good IDEs out there that have Powershell support also have integrated context-sensitive help. PrimalScript, Powershell Analyzer, Admin Script Editor are some. (Visual Studio 2008--not on the list. :< )

Create your own Windows PowerShell manual

Rod Trent at myITforum.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:41:24 GMT

The Windows PowerShell teams posts a script that will merge all of the PowerShell text files together

re: Dude, Where's My Manual?

Jay Bazuzi — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:34:52 GMT

The PowerShell Graphical Help File has the same information, with more rich formatting.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?FamilyID=3b3f7ce4-43ea-4a21-90cc-966a7fc6c6e8&displaylang=en

From Text to Help with PowerShell

Dewayne Hardin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:41:36 GMT

From Text to Help with PowerShell

Localization Improvements

Markus — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:05:15 GMT

The version above doesn't work very well on international systems (ie German with Umlauts) so I made some simple modifications to make it work:

* ensure Get-Content is called with -encoding UTF8

* wrap the heading and text within CDATA sections; thus we also get rid of the .replace() statements automatically as a positive side-effect

Here you are:

# Get-Manual.ps1

# This script merges the text from all about* help files in the Windows

# PowerShell installation directory ($pshome) into one Microsoft Word

# document (.doc) file and opens the file that was created.

# Set the file name for generated WordML document.

$doc = "AboutHelp.doc"

"Generating MS Word document ..."

$sb = New-Object System.Text.StringBuilder

$null = $sb.Append(@'

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>

<w:wordDocument

xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml"

xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/auxHint"

w:macrosPresent="no" w:embeddedObjPresent="no" w:ocxPresent="no" xml:space="preserve">

<w:styles>

<w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4" />

<w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal">

<w:name w:val="Normal" />

<w:rPr>

<w:rFonts w:ascii="Lucida Console" w:h-ansi="Lucida Console" w:cs="Lucida Console" />

<w:sz w:val="24" />

<w:sz-cs w:val="24" />

<w:lang w:val="EN-US" w:fareast="ZH-CN" w:bidi="AR-SA" />

</w:rPr>

</w:style>

<w:style w:type="paragraph" w:styleId="Heading1">

<w:name w:val="heading 1" />

<wx:uiName wx:val="Heading 1" />

<w:basedOn w:val="Normal" />

<w:next w:val="Normal" />

<w:pPr>

<w:pStyle w:val="Heading1" />

<w:keepNext />

<w:spacing w:before="240" w:after="120" />

<w:outlineLvl w:val="0" />

</w:pPr>

<w:rPr>

<w:b />

<w:b-cs />

<w:kern w:val="32" />

<w:sz w:val="32" />

<w:sz-cs w:val="32" />

</w:rPr>

</w:style>

</w:styles>

<w:body>

'@)

# Get all text lines in about* help files.

$filter = "about*.txt"

dir $PsHome -filter $filter -recurse | %{

$null = $sb.Append("<w:p><w:pPr><w:pStyle w:val=`"Heading1`" /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t><![CDATA[")

$null = $sb.Append($_)

$null = $sb.Append("]]></w:t></w:r></w:p>")

Get-Content $_.FullName -encoding UTF8 | %{

$null = $sb.Append("<w:p><w:r><w:t><![CDATA[")

$null = $sb.Append($_)

$null = $sb.Append("]]></w:t></w:r></w:p>")

}

$null = $sb.Append("</w:body></w:wordDocument>")

# Write generated string to document file.

$sb.ToString() | Out-File $doc -encoding UTF8

# Open the resulting file in MS-Word.

$null = [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("$pwd\$doc")

"Done"

re: Dude, Where's My Manual?

Aaron Perrault — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:05:41 GMT

I am getting an odd error when i try and run this. When i run the script, i get the following:

A Text/XML declaration may occur at the very beginning of input.

Location: Line 2, Column:56

This looks like it could be very helpful. Any assistance would be great.

app

re: Dude, Where's My Manual?

Chris Williams — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:25:37 GMT

I get this error as well. Can't open the Word doc.

re: Dude, Where's My Manual?

Vladimir Averkin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:18:48 GMT

About the following error:

A Text/XML declaration may occur at the very beginning of input.

Location: Line 2, Column:56

This error can happen if there is a whitespace character at the biginning of the file. It can be SPACE or TAB or LF or CR or any of them in combination. Most probably it is caused by inadvertent insertion of tab or space character into the script while copy-pasting it.

To fix it please make sure that in the following lines

$null = $sb.Append(@'

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

there are no extra whitespace characters between @' and <?xml