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Subject:RE: Questions about help authoring From:"Michele Marques" <marquesm -at- autros -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 23 Oct 2000 12:11:26 -0400
Meg Halter has some questions about help authoring:
> - If I build the help system in HTML, it should be portable pretty much
> anywhere. However, a set of HTML files includes links to each
> other and the
> path specifications are quite different between operating systems. How is
> that difference handled without rebuilding the HTML files for each OS?
In my experience, browsers on MacOS and various Win flavors will recognize
Unix-style path specifications - just make sure that you do not use special
characters that are illegal on any of OS (or that have other meanings on a
target OS) and that you do not use file case to differentiate files (e.g.,
example.htm and Example.htm are the same on Win systems).
Alternatively, if you are just storing graphics in some alternate locations,
ForeHelp lets you specify paths that are different in your target system
from your development system.
> I'm told
> that minor changes can be made directly to the resulting HTML in Unix
> without wrecking the help system, but if those minor changes aren't folded
> into the Forehelp project they'll be lost the next time the help is built.
> Further, we'd have to come back to ForeHelp for major changes.
> Any thoughts?
Also in ForeHelp, if you need some minor changes for the Unix system, then
you can set conditions in ForeHelp so that you include those variations
while developing in ForeHelp and have two different build conditions: Unix
and non-Unix (or more, if necessary).
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