Wow! That¹s quite an indictment of one of Apple, Inc¹s supposed developer tools. You¹d think that with $190B cash, they could fix this. One of the problems I ran into is that I couldn¹t find the indexing tool without going back to old versions. When I tried to use it, it choked, spewing a litany of error messages. So much for that (and using contextual help anchors).
I did take a stab at using the $39 (30-day free trial) HelpSupreme app. Aside from a few bugs, anomalies, and irritations, it worked, but I didn¹t care for the format. (That might be fixable in their CSS files.) Unfortunately, it has no provision for external links, movie files, or anchors. I then tried the $150 (limited free trial) SimpleHelpEditor. It¹s a lot more capable, but complex, and you end up having to write all the HTML yourself anyway, so why bother? One thing I found out is that if your root file is not index.html, you¹d better make sure your help file identifier does not have any spaces in it. I¹m considering just going back to my original (successful) approach and doing it all in BBEdit, for lack of finding any superior approach. On 5/7/14 8:44 AM, "Jakob Egger" <ja...@eggerapps.at> wrote: > I'd strongly recommend against using Apple's Help Book application. There are > a few problems with Apple Help: > > > Problems with Help Books > ==================== > > First of all, they are poorly documented. It is extremely difficult to > structure them in the right way. You can't use HTML5, you have to use some > special XHTML doctype. It took me weeks to find the right tags / anchors and > all the implicit requirements to get it working. > > Once you get them working, they might fail mysteriously. Sometimes Help Viewer > won't find your Help Book. Sometimes it will take 30 seconds or longer until > the Help Book is displayed, without any sensible feedback to the user. > Sometimes old versions of your Help Book will be displayed. > > Searching Help Books is slow. Again, no feedback, so your users will think > there are no results, when in reality Help Viewer is still indexing your help > book. > > Additionally, the erratic behaviour seemed to change with every major version > of OS X. > > Finally, when I contacted Apple Developer Technical Support, they told me that > they don't offer support for Help Books. > > > Alternatives > ========= > > The solution I went with was to use a simple web view that displays normal > HTML pages. A plain window with three toolbar items: back / forward / index. > Additionally, I provide the documentation for the latest version on my > website. > > The HTML in the app and on the website is slightly different, I use PHP to > generate the HTML. > > A more modern approach would probably be to use a static site generator like > Jekyll, which would allow you to use templates, write in Markdown, etc. > > Best wishes, > Jakob _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
