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XHyper_v1.1
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<MML 1.00 -- Sample.mml A sample mml file>
<Comment *** Define paragraphs and fonts tags>
<Include "Formats.mml">
<Comment *** Start of Document Text ***>
<Title>
Advanced On-Line Help System
<Section>
1.0 Introduction
<Body>
No highly interactive system is complete unless it is fully documented,
complete with "On-line Help", available while the system is operating,
in addition to "Off-line Help" (i.e. User's Manual's). Proper
documentation can greatly ease the learning curves associated with
systems, reducing cost to the end-users in the form of labor and
productivity. This in turn may reduce cost to the developers in
the form of reduced customer support. With the acceptance of
the <hyper XWindows> X Window System <endhyp> and in turn OSF/Motif
there has been a great deal of research and development in the
areas of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). However, very little has
been done with respect to the integration
of "Help" and documentation of these system. In this project, I
performed the initial development of an X based on-line help
system , <bold>XHyper<plain>, which features:
<Body>
1. Multiple fonts and highlighted text.\n
2. Paragraph formating and justification.\n
3. Integration of figures.\n
4. Hypertext.\n
5. On line help stored in Maker Markup Language format.\n
<Body>
<bold>XHyper<plain> is written in C++ and utilizes the
<hyper InterViews> InterViews <endhyp> package developed by
Stanford University.
<Section mml>
1.1 Maker Markup Language
<Body>
On of the most popular and powerful desktop publishing systems available
today is FrameMaker. FrameMaker is particularly powerful since it operates
on Unix work stations under the <hyper XWindows>X Window System<endhyp>.
FrameMaker files are stored in a very complex internal format. However,
to allow users to update documents from other word processors or text
editors, FrameMaker supports a the Maker Markup Language (MML).
<Figure "test.ips">
<Body>
The MML files are text files which
describe the format of the document in addition to it's contents.
Since the MML is very broad, this phase of development
of <bold>XHyper<plain> supports a small subset of the MML
with extensions for figures and <hyper Hypertext>hypertext<endhyp>.
<Section InterViews>
1.2 InterViews
<Body>
InterViews is a software system for X window-based applications.
InterViews comes from the idea of a user interface object presenting
an interactive view of some data (Linton, et al). For
example, <bold>XHyper <plain>implements an interactive view of
<hyper MML> MML <endhyp> based help files. The InterViews
package contains a set of libraries containing a large variety of C++
classes built on top of The <hyper XWindows>X Window Library (xlib)<endhyp>.
The most recent release of InterViews, version 3.0, contains a new base
class, Glyph. Appendix I contains a detailed description of Glyphs
and provides examples
from which XHyper evolved. Figure 2 illustrates the relation of InterViews
with res pect to the Xlib and applications. Note that the applications
DO NOT access the Xlib directly as to Xt based applications.