Re: Need Help with Help
Re: Need Help with Help
- Subject: Re: Need Help with Help
- From: Jessica Kahn <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 10:16:03 -0700
Dave & Mark,
Just wanted to add that there's a more up-to-date version of the
documentation for "Providing User Assistance with Apple Help," available
at <
http://developer.apple.com/macos/help.html>. See the link for "Apple
Help Documentation."
Also wanted to second Dave's assertion that .help bundles aren't really
for public consumption. Mark, what you want to do is create a basic,
non-bundled, help book (as documented in "Providing User Assistance with
Apple Help," and put it into the Resources area of your application's
bundle. If you won't be localizing it, it can go into Resources/, and if
you will, it can go into whatever is the appropriate Language.lproj/
folder.
Then, you set up those two keys that Dave mentioned (also discussed in
the new documentation), and you should wind up with a Help menu, with
one item, that opens to your application's main help page.
Good luck with it, and write back if you run into roadblocks.
--Jess
On Wednesday, August 1, 2001, at 05:46 AM, David P. Henderson wrote:
On Wednesday, August 1, 2001, at 05:08 , Mark T wrote:
As silly as this sounds, I can't figure out how to properly make a Help
file for my application. I've been looking through tons of
documentation on various Cocoa sites, reading source code, and
examining how Help works in various programs that I use.
Actually,it is not silly at all. Creating application help in Cocoa is
not documented by Apple as far as I know.
My discovery is that Help is implemented in a wide variety of ways,
some of which are trivial to implement and some of which baffle me.
xFiles used what I regard as the cleanest approach, using a .help
Bundle/Package to encapsulate all of its HTML files and images. Are
there any programs to create .help bundles or do they have to be
crafted by hand(a nearly trivial task with a template to work from)? In
either case, how does one get Project Builder to put it where it's
supposed to be in the application bundle, since you can't add a really
add a folder/package/bundle to its file list? And then how does one
connect it to the Help command? Can you stick a .help file in Target:
Application Settings: Cocoa-Specific: HTML Help File?
The .help bundle is undocumented and the word from Apple is that it is
intended for use by others at this point. But a help bundle is just a
bundle so it should follow the same guidelines as other bundles with
regard to structure.
On that topic, I tried to make a simple one file html page to use as my
help file, which I entered in the field I just mentioned. But when I
choose Help in my program, it opens the file in Internet Explorer
instead of Helpviewer. I realize that I could change its mapping in Get
Info: Application, but other applications(notably AOL IM) have html
help files which open in IE when double clicked but if you choose Help
within the program, it opens in Helpviewer.
The help field in Project Builder is a BUG. It sets a InfoPlist Key
which is deprecated as it is part of the old Cocoa help system and not
the Apple Help system. You need to delete the help key from you plist,
do this from the expert setting because you need to delete the key and
value if you just delete the value it will screw up your attempts to
display your help file. The correct keys to add to your InfoPlist are
CFBundleHelpBookFolder and CFBundleHelpBookName.
You should get the Apple Help SDK[1] it contains the complete reference
to create Apple Help files. But in the interim you can read the article
"Help Yourself Help Others"[2] which while not complete does allow you
to create basic help for your Application which takes advantage of the
Apple Help system. Also, if you can acquire a copy of the April 2001
issue of MacTech Magazine[3], Andrew Stone wrote an article on creating
application help files using the Apple Help SDK
[1]
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Development_Kits/Apple_Help_1.2_SDK_1.0.sit.
hqx or you get it off the Developer Tools CD from the Carbon SDK.
[2] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/05/25/mac_help.html
[3] http://www.mactech.com/
Dave
--
Chaos Assembly Werks
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein
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