Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!dircon!uad1031 From: uad1031@dircon.uucp (Julian Templeman) Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms.programmer Subject: Writing Windows Help Files Message-ID: <1991PMWed.09.8666@dircon.uucp> Date: 10 Jan 91 05:51:17 GMT Sender: uad1031@dircon.uucp (Julian Templeman) Reply-To: uad1031@dircon.uucp (Julian Templeman) Organization: The Direct Connection, UK Lines: 44 Catching up with news after Christmas, I find that.... John R. Burgoyne writes: > Has anyone successfully created other than trivial .RTF > files using something other than one of the Word family > of word processors? tom@mims-iris.waterloo.edu (Tom Haapanen) writes: > >Indeed, the RTF format is ASCII, but there it's RIDICULOUS to think of >writing real help documents (100-200K) in RTF by hand! Right now, I think >WfW is the best bet. Having spent loadsamoney on the SDK, and various other bits (like C 6. 0), we (ie. the boss) rather objected to shelling out a lot more for a word-processor that we wouldn't use for anything else but help files. My approach was to write a small troff-like text processor which reads ASCII files and produces an RTF file which HC will happily use. As well as the help-specific items (context strings, keywords etc), enough formatting commands are included to enable me to produce reasonable- looking help screens. So far it supports everything except build tags (including bitmap placement), and is proving quite a useful tool for medium-size help systems. In fact, it turns out that Word will also accept the RTF files produced, which was a surprise to me - it seems that most of the junk at the start of an RTF file is optional. Thus, if we do get a copy of WfW later, I can port the files over. Even though this was just a quick hack (1.5 days) to get my help files written for our first exploratory Windows port, having tried a borrowed copy of Word, I'm finding this approach much more comprehensible, and worth developing. julian -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Julian Templeman Baker Jardine & Associates Tel: +44-81-371-5644 London SW6 4TJ, England Fax: +44-81-371-5182 ...ukc!dircon!uad1031