Top Writer is a web application for technical writers to easily edit and assemble topic-oriented user guides and other high level reference works. Application users edit within a structured framework, using meaningful application elements to chunk and contain content. Users can extend the application with their own elements and rules, if needed.

Delivery of content is meant to be multi-format, with each format having separate templating rules.

The server part of the application is coded in Haskell using FastCGI on a lighttpd server and using the HDBC library connecting to a PostgreSQL database server. The client web browser part heavily uses the jQuery Javascript toolkit.

FuturePlans:

Currently, the focus for delivering output is on generated HTML, but plans are also to generate PDF and any other format that is reasonable. Other work is focused on collaborative features, allowing multiple clients to share projects, edit contained documents concurrently, and see other project member's changes immediately. The more element-like structure for editing a document can facilitate this, removing the complexity of having to consider overlapping changes.

More information coming soon!

Jon Strait