An application's user documentation, also referred to as the user manual, is
one of the core elements required in application distribution. While there
exist many tools to aid an application's developer in creating and maintaining
documentation on and for the code itself, there are no tools that complement
code development with user documentation for modern graphical applications.
Approaches like literate programming are not applicable to this scenario, as
not a library, but a full application is to be documented to an end-user.
Documentation generation on applications up to now was only partially feasible
due to the gap between the code and its semantics. The new generation of
Eclipse rich client platform developed applications is based on an application
model, closing a broad semantic gap between code and visible interface. We use
this application model to provide a semantic description for the contained
elements. Combined with the internal relationships of the application model,
these semantic descriptions are aggregated to well-structured user
documentations that comply to the ISO/IEC 26514. This paper delivers a report
on the Ecrit research project, where the potentials and limitations of user
documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model were
investigated.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
