Authoring Help Information

The topics in this chapter of the JavaHelp System User's Guide describe the aspects of the JavaHelp software that are of primary interest to online help authors. These topics assume that the author is responsible for creating the metadata files that the JavaHelp software uses to present information, as well as the topics that inform the application's users. Together the metadata and topic files are referred to as a helpset.

If you use a help authoring tool to create your help system, some of the details described in this chapter are managed for you by the tool.

The following list summarizes the tasks required to create a helpset. All these tasks are described in this chapter of the JavaHelp System User's Guide:

• Create HTML topics
• Create a helpset file
• Create a map file
• Create a table of contents file
• Create an index file
• Create a full-text search database
• Compress and encapsulate the help files into a JAR file for delivery to customers

Consider the following strategy as a way to get started:

1. Use the demonstration programs included with the release to acquaint yourself with JavaHelp system features. The most useful demo for this purpose is idehelp. This program demonstrates a fully functional help system.
2. Read the remainder of this chapter of the JavaHelp System User's Guide, and explore the helpset files created for the idehelp demo (extract the files in demos\hsjar\idehelp.jar).
3. Create your own helpset as follows:
   1. Create HTML topics using an editor of your choosing.
   2. Copy the metadata files you extracted from demos\hsjar\idehelp.jar (IdeHelp.hs, IdeHelpIndex.xml, IdeHelpTOC.xml, and Map.jhm) to the folder that contains your topic files and rename them appropriately.
   3. Edit the metadata files to match your help information.
   4. Optionally create a full-text search database.
   5. Use the hsviewer command to display your helpset.