is the 'topic.dat' used to synthesize a top-level document or
table of contents and then all help browsing descends from there
or is there also the concept of a 'index.html' or 'main.html'
that serves as an intro/greeting into the help pages.
i need for the help to be usable on Win32, BeOS, Solaris, ...
where Gnome isn't present, so i need to make sure that the
layouts scheme can be used in either context....
thanks for the tip,
jeff
Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Jeff Hostetler wrote:
> > yes. the idea was simple HTML all contained within a single
> > directory (.../EnUS/*.html) with local hrefs so that we can
> > translate them by cloning the file/link layout (ie .../FrFR/*.html)
> > and inserting new prose.
> >
> > this way help lookup becomes something like:
> > OpenUrl("$AbiLibDir/$AppName/help/$Language/foo.html")
> >
>
> This is ever-so-slightly gratuitously different from the GNOME help file
> layout. I think it would be good to copy Gnome; basically this means, use
> the name of the locale (en_US, en_GB, not EnUS), and install a topic.dat
> as an index of help topics. topic.dat is just URL/topic pairs, like this:
>
> gnumeric.html Gnumeric manual
> function-reference.html Gnumeric function reference
>
> Then with the Gnome port you can just symlink $(datadir)/gnome/help over
> to $AbiLibDir/$AppName/help, and you can also use the Gnome help browser
> (which will be nice once we have Mozilla componentized).
>
> Help should probably go in $(datadir) anyway, because it's
> architecture-independent.
>
> We're still regretting making our .desktop files randomly different from
> .kdelnk while changing nothing of consequence, so I thought I'd warn you
> guys in advance. :-)
>
> If there are good non-gratuitous reasons for the difference, please
> disregard...
>
> Havoc