Re: Help Book Problems
Re: Help Book Problems
- Subject: Re: Help Book Problems
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 07:06:41 -0500
on 03-03-18 3:01 AM, Henry McGilton at email@hidden wrote:
>
Ah Hah! From reading your explanation, and from perusing 'Cocoa
>
Programming', and (as usual) reading between the lines of all of
>
the above, I just did a little bit of experimenting. I have
>
concluded that the App icon *must* be in the top level of the help
>
folder. That is to say, I can state:
>
>
<meta name="AppleIcon" content="HenryHelpFolder/henryicon.gif">
>
>
But I can not state:
>
>
<meta name="AppleIcon"
>
content="HenryHelpFolder/images/henryicon.gif">
>
>
Do people agree with this, or no? Certainly, when I placed my App
>
icon in the designated help folder, things now work. This stuff
>
makes no sense at all to me.
This is not the case. My help book icon is in an "images" subfolder and it
works fine. It's a jpeg, but I don't believe that's a requirement.
My experience with Apple Help (over a period of years) is that it is highly
sensitive to correct links (including the custom meta tags) and file
placement. There's nothing unusual about this in software development, of
course, but the documentation is less than clear or complete, and there is a
lot of obsolete documentation still floating around. Also, Carbon and Cocoa
techniques are not completely equivalent, and some of the documentation
fails to state which environment it is talking about.
The very best way to develop help books, in my experience, is to work from a
copy of a help book that works in an application using your development
environment (Carbon or Cocoa). From anybody's application -- some of the
Omni applications make a good starting point. You will of course change all
the text and images to be your own, but the file structure and the basic
links you will find have the advantage of working from the start.
As to the slowness, one thing I've found that makes a huge difference is
getting all the links right. I know you've double-checked them, but you
might want to triple-check them. What seems to happen is that a bad link is
interpreted as a possible link to a Web site, so Help Viewer goes out
looking for it on the Web. That takes a long time, especially if it doesn't
find anything on the Web. I was getting horrible delays (spinning pinwheel
cursor) on one of my apps; when I found and fixed a single bad internal
link, the delay disappeared and my help book now launches faster than just
about anybody's.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook -
http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com
Vermont Recipes -
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
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