How This Book Is Organized

This book has four parts. Part 1 describes the collaborative role that authors and developers undertake to design application help. Part 2 provides information for authors organizing and writing online help. Part 3 describes the Help System application programmer's toolkit. Part 4 contains information for both authors and programmers about preparing online help for different language environments.

This book includes these chapters:

Part 1— Introduction

Chapter 1 “Introducing the Help System” provides an overview of authors' and developers' collaborative role in producing online help.

Part 2— The Author's Job

Chapter 2 “Organizing and Writing a Help Volume” describes the components that make up a help volume.

Chapter 3 “Writing a Help Topic” introduces the Help System markup language and gives examples of elements used to format different types of information. It describes how to include graphics and create hyperlinks.

Chapter 4 “Processing and Displaying a Help Volume” describes how to process a marked-up file (or files) to generate a single run-time file for online viewing.

The Guide to the DocBook DTD lists in alphabetical order the DocBook markup language elements, and describes their use.

Chapter 5 “Summary of Special Character Entities” provides a list of characters and associated entity names that can be used to insert special characters into help topic text.

Chapter 6 “Command Summary” summarizes how to process and view a help volume by entering commands in a terminal emulator window.

Chapter 7 “Reading the DocBook Document Type Definition” describes the DocBook DTD and how to use it to create fully compliant Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) help files.

Part 3— The Programmer's Job

Chapter 8 “Creating and Managing Help Dialog Boxes” introduces the Help Dialog widgets and explains how to use them.

Chapter 9 “Responding to Help Requests” explains how an application provides entry points to access different types of help.

Chapter 10 “Handling Events in Help Dialogs” shows how an application can use a callback structure to handle hyperlink events.

Chapter 11 “Providing Help on Help” describes how an application can provide a help module that tells users how to use the Help System.

Chapter 12 “Preparing an Installation Package” covers what to include in an installation package to supply online help with an application.

Part 4— Internationalization

Chapter 13 “Native Language Support” identifies language-dependent files used by the Help System.

Glossary is a list of words and phrases found in this book and their definitions.