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I am writing a documentation for a project that involves multiple developers. We use Subversion (SVN) to work on our code base.

I wrote the first draft of the documentation document using HelpNDoc, which I like for the nice tree-view and easy of use; the problem is that there is a single file, so I don't know how to use SVN to allow other developers to contribute to the documentation and update it.

Do you know if it's possible? If not, can you advice a nice software, easy to use, with a tree-view of the documentation that can be used with SVN or makes it possible for multiple users to update it? We use Windows.

jonjbar
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Ant
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  • Note that in newer versions of HelpNDoc it is possible to keep the library files as external to the core HND file. Still not ideal for source control but would keep your HND datafile smaller and thus have less impact should you push it to the remote repository. – Andrew Truckle Feb 22 '22 at 12:45
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    @AndrewTruckle i think the main issue is the lack of meaningful diffs (since it's binary), rather than the size – Ant Feb 22 '22 at 19:57

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HelpNDoc projects are binary files based on the SQLite open source database engine. The advantage is that the whole documentation stored in a single file so it can easily be copied, moved, shared, backed-up... However one drawback is that it has to be checked-in as binary content in any version control system including Subversion: diff and merge are not possible on those files.

One possible solution would be to use external documents in HelpNDoc's library: each user works on her own document (which can be a Word document, and HTML web-page...) and a master HelpNDoc project is created to include those documents at generation time. See "Include a file at generation time" in the following step by step guide: How to add an item to the library

jonjbar
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Amount of files doesn't matter, real format (text/* or binary) - does. If SVN|any VCS can merge two HelpNDoc files with diverged history (just try it by hand), you'll be happy

Lazy Badger
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I once used Helpinator for software documentation, it's pretty close to HelpnDoc but it's storage format is more suitable for version control.

Jack D
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