Documancer 0.2.6 review

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Documancer is programmer's documentation reader with very fast fulltext searching

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 0K
Developer: Vaclav Slavik
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Documancer is programmer's documentation reader with very fast fulltext searching. It's available for Unix (using GTK+) and Windows and implemented using wxPython. It has several advantages over using web browser or specialized format-specific viewers:

unified access to all documentation formats
the GUI is better suited for documentation reading that generic web browser
documancer can create fulltext index for the docs and enables the user to quickly search it
bookmarks and indexes are manual-specific, which reduces false matches and chaos in bookmarks

Here are some key features of "Documancer":
Supported Documentation Formats

Documancer can display documentation in all commonly used formats:

HTML

Support for reading locally stored HTML files.

DevHelp

Documancer can read HTML books stored in format used by the DevHelp viewer and generated by gtk-doc tool. Documentation for GTK+ and various GNOME libraries is in this format.

Info pages

The backend is implemented using de-facto standard info2html converter.

Manual pages

The backend uses modified man2html from official man distribution. It was tailored to produce fancier output similar to KDE's viewer.

WWW sites

Remote WWW sites with documentation (e.g. msdn.microsoft.com) can be viewed in Documancer as well. In this case, fulltext search is implemented using Yahoo! Search service.

pydoc

pydoc is a tool bundled with Python that scans all installed Python modules and generates documentation from their docstrings. It is invaluable when working with modules that are only poorly documented in official HTML documentation.

User Interface

Documancer's UI is tailored to be used as a documentation reader. It is based on Mozilla's HTML rendering engine Gecko. Documentation of all formats is presented in same UI and in central place.

Documancer can create fulltext search index for documentation, so that you can quickly search it for things you need.
Everything (bookmarks, fulltext search, ...) is organized into tematic books (e.g. Python Manual, GTK+ Manual, Autoconf). You work only with a single book at a time and you are never bothered with false search results etc.
Bookmarks.

Requirements:
Python >= 2.3
Mozilla >= 1.3 (including headers)
wxPython >= 2.4.0
wxMozilla >= 0.5.3
Perl
PyLucene or Java runtime

What's New in This Release:
support full Lucene expressions in queries
added support for DevHelp books
added provider for reading web pages (searching powered by Yahoo! Search)
install desktop entry for GNOME/KDE on Unix
fixed PyLucene crashes with Python 2.4

Documancer 0.2.6 keywords