Re: Help files Tutorial

FROM : Sherm Pendley
DATE : Fri Jul 28 17:45:14 2006

On Jul 28, 2006, at 10:30 AM, Chad Armstrong wrote:

> Is there a tutorial out there how to adhere to the style of Help 
> files Apple has been pushing towards since Panther?


It's basically just HTML with a few extra tags added for indexing:

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/
ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html>

... or locally ...

<file:///Developer/ADC%20Reference%20Library/documentation/Carbon/
Conceptual/ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html>

> I've been inspecting various Help files from a variety of 
> applications.  Some things are easy to figure out, but there are 
> somethings like the indexing and anchors and such that I am 
> wondering about, and if there is any proper rhyme or reason behind 
> how Apple is doing things.  How is a file name like fs1799.html 
> supposed to make sense?  What is wrong with a file like faq.html?


Names like that are not a requirement of the help system itself. 
Given the huge amount of documentation they have to create and 
manage, Apple is probably using a content management system which 
generates those page and anchor names.

sherm--


Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net