Entity declaration
Assigns an entity name to a string of characters or to an external file.
Syntax.
<!entity entityname "string">
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Or:
<!entity entityname FILE "filename">
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An entity name can contain up to 64 letters, digits, and hyphens. Case is
not significant in entity names, but is often used to improve readability
for the author. The first character must be a letter. No space is
permitted between the left angle bracket (<), the exclamation mark
(!) and entity in an <!entity> declaration.
Entity declarations must always precede any other markup or text in
the help volume.
Where you want the defined entity to appear, insert an entity reference
using this syntax:
The entity reference consists of an ampersand (&), followed by the
entity name (as defined in the entity declaration), and ending with
a semicolon (;).
Purposes for Entities.
There are four common reasons for defining an entity:
Text that is associated with an entity name appears only once
so that changing the text requires making a change
in only one place. All references to the entity automatically change
when HelpTag reprocesses the files.
The inefficiency of typing the same long or complex text string many times
can be avoided (along with typing mistakes) by typing just a short
entity reference wherever that text string will appear. The full
text string needs to be typed only once.
The <figure> and <graphic> elements do not accept a file name.
The name of the file that contains the figure must be specified in an
entity declaration.
It is convenient to put the help text into multiple files, yet
HelpTag accepts only one source file. These needs can be balanced by
creating one file that contains entity declarations and
entity references that refer to the files that contain the actual
help text.
Examples.
The volume.htg source file can contain the following entity
declarations and entity references so that the actual text can be put
into the named files:
<!entity topic1 FILE "topic1">
<!entity topic2 FILE "topic2">
<!entity topic3 FILE "topic3">
&topic1;
&topic2;
&topic3;
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The following entity declaration causes the words "HP Precision Architecture"
to be displayed wherever the &hppa; entity reference appears in the
marked-up files.
<!entity hppa "HP Precision Architecture">
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The following entity declaration for a figure is placed at
the beginning of the source file:
<!entity CloseUpFig FILE "figname.tif">
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and the figure would be inserted where the following markup appears:
<figure entity=CloseUpFig>
Close Up View
<\figure>
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See Also.
Printable version
