Senior Project - MOLD

The demand for online documentation has skyrocketed in recent years. Previously, online documentation consisted of such products as man pages and was written mostly by and for programmers. Today, users are asking for online documentation ranging from context-sensitive help to quick retrieval of passages from user manuals. Existing UNIX tools are no longer adequate. This project involved the development of a new tool that helps documentation specialists keep up with the flood of new information and get it into the hands of users more efficiently. The tool, designed using an object-oriented approach and implemented in C++, includes the following capabilities: management of a multiple-document "database", including ways to add and delete documents; document retrieval by title, keyword, or full-text searches; maintenance of usage statistics on the documents; a seamless interface that enables the tool to work across a distributed computing environment; filters for creating and viewing ASCII versions of documents originally created with popular WYSIWYG systems. Three versions of the user interface were provided: an X Windows version and an ASCII terminal version for "regular" users, along with an X Windows version providing additional capability for administrators of the system.