Roger Binns
2005-01-28 18:11:08 UTC
Enough of my time has been wasted by this. I have been trying to get
BitPim to use the native help system on Mac. In the end I failed due
to gaping holes in Apple's documentation. If someone else can figure
out the answers to these questions I'll go ahead and change things,
otherwise you'll just have to stick with wxWidgets help system.
The documentation is at
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/
ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html
You can turn the BitPim help into help that conforms with the above by
doing the following:
- Make a directory somewhere
- Extract resources/bitpim.htb using unzip into that directory
- Edit welcome.htm to add a tag in the head section: <META
="AppleTitle" CONTENT="BitPim help">
- Drag and drop the folder onto the help indexing tool (It is in
/Developer/Applications/Utilities). (For some reason Apple go out of
their way to ensure you can't run this tool from the command line).
According to the doc that is all that is necessary to make a
non-localized help book. To use it you can do the following:
import Carbon.AH
Carbon.AH.AHGotoPage(None, "file:///path/to/welcome.htm", None)
That will correctly bring up the help. However the search function
won't work, and it thinks the book title is (null). (So what exactly
was the point of the meta tag above then? Why does it ignore the index
it created?)
Presumably some pieces are missing. Maybe you have to use the
Carbon.AH.AHRegisterHelpBook function (I couldn't find any parameter
that would not give an error). There is probably a property list file
that should be somewhere although the online documentation doesn't say
where (in that directory, in a parent directory, somewhere else?). It
also doesn't say how to create a property list from the command line
even if I knew where to put it, nor what it actually needs to contain.
Note that I am trying to create a standalone non-localized help book
that is not part of any other bundle or even of BitPim, and do so
entirely from the command line.
And I have to admit that the more I use MacOS, the less and less
impressed I am. It feels very comparable to Linux GUI environments
with applications randomly incomplete, appalling documentation, lots of
unpolished corners and some sort of promise that you should excuse all
this because of how much better it will be in the future.
Roger
BitPim to use the native help system on Mac. In the end I failed due
to gaping holes in Apple's documentation. If someone else can figure
out the answers to these questions I'll go ahead and change things,
otherwise you'll just have to stick with wxWidgets help system.
The documentation is at
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/
ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html
You can turn the BitPim help into help that conforms with the above by
doing the following:
- Make a directory somewhere
- Extract resources/bitpim.htb using unzip into that directory
- Edit welcome.htm to add a tag in the head section: <META
="AppleTitle" CONTENT="BitPim help">
- Drag and drop the folder onto the help indexing tool (It is in
/Developer/Applications/Utilities). (For some reason Apple go out of
their way to ensure you can't run this tool from the command line).
According to the doc that is all that is necessary to make a
non-localized help book. To use it you can do the following:
import Carbon.AH
Carbon.AH.AHGotoPage(None, "file:///path/to/welcome.htm", None)
That will correctly bring up the help. However the search function
won't work, and it thinks the book title is (null). (So what exactly
was the point of the meta tag above then? Why does it ignore the index
it created?)
Presumably some pieces are missing. Maybe you have to use the
Carbon.AH.AHRegisterHelpBook function (I couldn't find any parameter
that would not give an error). There is probably a property list file
that should be somewhere although the online documentation doesn't say
where (in that directory, in a parent directory, somewhere else?). It
also doesn't say how to create a property list from the command line
even if I knew where to put it, nor what it actually needs to contain.
Note that I am trying to create a standalone non-localized help book
that is not part of any other bundle or even of BitPim, and do so
entirely from the command line.
And I have to admit that the more I use MacOS, the less and less
impressed I am. It feels very comparable to Linux GUI environments
with applications randomly incomplete, appalling documentation, lots of
unpolished corners and some sort of promise that you should excuse all
this because of how much better it will be in the future.
Roger