wxWidgets/utils/HelpHTML

HelpHTML : Support scripts for generating external HTML help files
------------------------------------------------------------------

The scripts in this directory can be used to generate external HTML
help files for use with wxHTMLHelpControllerBase derived help implemen-
tations. Currently the only implementation using this is the
wxExtHelpController class, using an external HTML browser. I hope to 
add a class using a wxWindows-built-in HTML viewer soon.

These viewers need a "wxhelp.map" file in the help directory which
maps numeric help IDs to relative URLs, having entries like:

1000		overview.html;Overview
1010            mainmanu.html;Main Menu
...

The numeric help ids are used to refer to the help in the application,
the URL specifies the file to be displayed, relative to the help base
directory (extended by the locale name if that directory exists) and the
text behind the semicolon is used to display and search a list of all help
topics.

html2wxhelp:
------------
The html2wxhelp script in this directory allow you to automatically generate
this file from a set of HTML pages. All you need is to append the numeric ID
to the section header in the HTML file like this:
<H1>Overview_1000_</H1>

html2wxhelp will scan all html files in the directory in which it is called
and find these lines. It will create a wxhelp.map file and strip the help 
IDs from the HTML files. So you should have a backup of the files before
running it, or a way to regenerate them.

striphelpids:
-------------

Called with the name of a .tex file, it will strip the help IDs from the file,
so the IDs do not show up in the printed documentation.


How to use them:
----------------

I use LyX to generate the docs, export the text as LaTeX. I then use
latex2html to generate the set of HTML pages and html2wxhelp to generate
the map file from them. Then I run striphelpids on the .tex file before
generating PostScript documentation from that.
The whole process can easily be automated with a Makefile. For an example
of how to do this, see the source of my mail program, available from
http://www.phy.hw.ac.uk/~karsten/M/


Karsten Ballueder	<Ballueder@usa.net>