Hehe. :-)
> 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....
>
Right. The help browser appears to use index.html, but it has special
knowledge of the directory layout (to pick the right locale). It probably
should use topic.dat though and may in the future.
The main purpose of topic.dat right now is to autogenerate a help menu,
gnome-libs knows how to do this. i.e. Gnome apps will have an entry in the
Help menu for every topic. So most topic.dat files are small, they aren't
a complete index, just some important shortcuts. The nice thing is that
local admins can add stuff to it and have it show up in the menu - say,
documentation for local spreadsheets or templates.
I don't know if you want to use topic.dat on every platform, though you
could just install it and ignore it on every platform, it isn't hurting
anything.
I guess on non-Gnome platforms you'd have to select the right locale
directory by hand, but after that it's just HTML.
Havoc