Help System

The Common Desktop Environment Help system is a complete system for developing and displaying online help for application software. It enables authors to write online help that includes rich graphics and text formatting, hyperlinks, and access to the Help system from within the application. The Help system provides a programmer's toolkit for integrating the help facilities into an application.

Creating and integrating online help into an application can be done as a collaborative project. Developers design and implement how an application responds to a user's request for help. Authors organize and write the actual help information that is displayed.

The Help system includes support for authors and programmers.

For Authors

• Common Desktop Environment HelpTag markup language—a set of tags used in text files to mark organization and content of online help

• Common Desktop Environment HelpTag software—a set of software tools for converting HelpTag files into run-time help files

• Common Desktop Environment Helpview application—a viewer program for displaying online help

Authors create help topics using the Help tag set and follow Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML) tagging conventions. SGML markup is the primary data format. When compiled, the run-time distribution format is SGML-compliant.

The Help system also supports non-SGML formats such as UNIX man pages, text files, and text strings.

For Programmers

• DtHelp programming library—Application program interface (API) for creating and integrating help windows into your application

• DtHelp widgets— DtHelpDialog and DtHelpQuickDialog widgets to create help dialog boxes and quick help dialog boxes (these are also part of the Help library)

Library and Header Files

The Help library, libDtHelp, provides support for creating and managing help dialogs based on Motif. The libDtHelp header files are:

• Dt/Help.h

• Dt/HelpDialog.h

• Dt/HelpQuickD.h

Demo Programs

You can find the Help system demos in /usr/dt/examples/dthelp. Read the README file for detailed information on the demos.

Related Documentation

For more information on the Help system, see the relevant man pages and the Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide.