Okay, I have got Apple Help working for my application (the first time
I have written a help book), and I wanted to encapsulate some of what
I have learned in a message, in case others might benefit. The docs
about how to set up help are good, but still (for me) left some
questions unanswered. I used Affrus help (you can download the
program and inspect it; the help was written by Matt Neuburg) as a
model and used VoodooPad's HTML exporting capabilities in order to
create a help system with many crosslinks. VoodooPad has been working
really well for me in this capacity, but I needed to make a few
changes to the resulting HTML:
1. Add the Apple meta tags to index.html
2. Add <title>Title Here</title> to each page.
You need (1) to get everything to work. You need (2) to make help
searchable from the "Ask a question" field in the help app. This
poses a problem, because each time I export the help pages from
VoodooPad, these tags are missing. So, I set up a Ruby script to do
so automatically. I don't know much Ruby, but I was able to piece
together the following:
!/usr/bin/ruby
# Change method
def Change(file, regex_to_find, text_to_put_in_place)
text= File.read file
File.open(file, 'w+'){|f| f << text.gsub(regex_to_find,
text_to_put_in_place)}
end
# Add the apple-specific meta tags to index.html
Change('index.html',
/6\">
<style type="text\/css">/,
"6\">
<meta name=\"AppleTitle\" content=\"My Help\">
<meta name=\"AppleIcon\" content=\"AppName%20Help/images/icon-name.png
\">
<style type=\"text/css\">")
# index.html: Add title - have one of these for each .html file
Change('index.html',
/<title></,
"<title>Index of topics<")
There is probably a way to automate this further, but at least it
means I don't have to edit the exported HTML by hand each time.
Finally, I would end up having my cocoa app still display the old help
when I wiped out the old help files and replaced them with new ones.
In order to get the new help book recognised, I (1) delete ~/Library/
caches/com.apple.helpui; and (2) delete references and re-reference
the help files in Xcode.
Thanks to all those who helped with with various pieces of this
solution.
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