{"id":196,"date":"2022-11-09T09:58:31","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T08:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/?p=196"},"modified":"2022-11-09T09:58:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T08:58:31","slug":"creating-a-help-book-for-a-macos-application","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/?p=196","title":{"rendered":"Creating a help book for a MacOS application"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The process to create an help book for a MacOS is not very well documented. The available documentation is old and archived: link<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From that old documentation and some of the information found<\/a> on the Apple Developer Forum I was able to create an Help book for a SwiftUI<\/TT> application.<\/p>\n

The book structure<\/h2>\n

Assume that the name of the application is XXX<\/strong> and the author has domain bogus.com<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Create The following structure:<\/p>\n

\"Tree<\/p>\n

The files in the directory English.lproj<\/tt> are the content. So a main page index.html<\/tt> which loads some logo from the file utl_download_9531nu_logo.svg<\/tt> and has a link to a secondary page mainPage.html<\/tt>. The content is fully free, it is just standard HTML<\/tt> and the main page doesn’t even have to be named index.html<\/tt>.<\/p>\n

The file Info.plist<\/tt> has the following content:<\/p>\n

\"Info<\/p>\n

Because the file is named Info.plist<\/tt>, the key names are translated to their textual meaning. If you temporarily rename this file to, e.g. XXX.plist<\/tt> it will reveal the actual key names:<\/p>\n

\"Raw<\/p>\n

Enabling the help<\/h2>\n

Just creating the help book doesn’t have any immediate effect. It must be enabled in the Info.plist<\/tt> of the application. Add the following two keys:<\/p>\n

\"Enable<\/p>\n

This file should already have other entries, but they are left out because they are not relevant for building a help book.<\/p>\n

Installing the help<\/h2>\n

Finally, the help book must be copied when you build the application.<\/p>\n

\"Install<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Select the name of the project<\/li>\n
  2. Select the proper target<\/li>\n
  3. Select the build phases<\/li>\n
  4. Install your help book as a bundle<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Run the application<\/h2>\n

    Finally run your application and check out your help page. There is no need to make any change in your application to enable the help book.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The process to create an help book for a MacOS is not very well documented. The available documentation is old and archived: link. From that old documentation and some of the information found on the Apple Developer Forum I was able to create an Help book for a SwiftUI application. The book structure Assume that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,10],"tags":[31,30,16,28],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-software","category-swift","tag-help","tag-macos","tag-swift","tag-swiftui","anons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fred.appelman.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

Create the index file<\/h2>\n

To make your help book searchable, you have to create a file named help.helpindex.<\/p>\n

On the command line run, the following command:<\/p>\n

hiutil -Cf XXX.help\/Contents\/Resources\/English.lproj\/help.helpindex XXX.help\/Contents\/Resources\/English.lproj\/<\/tt><\/p>\n

This will create the file help.helpindex<\/tt>:<\/p>\n

\"Create<\/p>\n

Note that in order to make your index really searchable, your files should provide hints:<\/p>\n

Keywords<\/b><\/p>\n

\"UntitledImage\"<\/p>\n

Abstracts<\/b><\/p>\n

\"UntitledImage\"<\/p>\n

For more details see link<\/a><\/p>\n