The online Help system encompasses a variety of features:
Help text in tag editors and in the Tag Chooser provides context-sensitive syntax and usage information.
For more information, see "Help tab".
Using the Visual Tools Markup Language (VTML), you can edit Help text in dialog boxes or add your own. For details, see "Customizing the Development Environment".
The online Help References contain the printed product documentation in HTML format and additional online references. They are an extensible resource for learning about product features, technology extensions, and other development topics.
Click the Help tab at the bottom of the Resources window to view the Help References tree. The Help toolbar is located at the top of the Help References pane.
If you are using Internet Explorer as the internal browser, you can print a Help topic by right-clicking the document in Browse mode and selecting Print.
The default internal browser does not support printing.
You can quickly access your favorite Help documents by bookmarking them. You can assign bookmarks to documents in the Help tree, the file system, or the Internet.
The Help Bookmarks dialog box appears.
The bookmark appears in the Help Bookmarks dialog box.
The bookmark disappears from the list.
You can access a book's online index in the Help reference tree, or you can search the entire set of Help References using simple to complex search criteria.
With the exception of language references, each book in the Help reference tree on the Help Resources tab has an online index.
The Index for the selected book appears with a link for each letter of the alphabet.
To Search Help References for the first time on your system, you should allow the program to index the files; that is, to generate a full-text search database from the Help reference tree contents. This greatly improves the search engine performance.
After the initial indexing, each time you open the Help panel the program checks the Help References tree for changes. If Help files have been added or deleted, the program automatically indexes the Help files again.
If you have problems with Help Search, re-index (regenerate the search database for) the contents of the Help folder. To do so, close the program, delete the
Verity/Collections folder in your installation directory, open the program again, and run a search. Click Yes to allow Verity to re-index the Help files.
For information on using search operators, click the Search Tips button.
The results list is saved until a new search is run, so you can return to the document list by clicking the Search results button on the Help toolbar.
Tip To redo a recent search, click the down arrow next to the Enter the word(s) to find box and select the search keywords you previously used from the drop-down list. |
You can use a variety of advanced search operators to make your searching more precise. For information on using advanced search operators, click the Search Tips button in the Search Help References dialog box.
To print the search, open Help/Macromedia Support/VeritySearchTips.htm and use your browser's print command.
You can comment directly on our online documentation, or view others' comments.
A live version of the page from our Web site appears.
If there are no comments for that page, only a button appears.
Your comment is added to the system, and members of the Macromedia documentation group are notified.
Members of the Macromedia documentation group then attempt to correct errors and clarify points directly on the Comments page. Larger documentation issues are targeted to the next product release. And, in general, they use your feedback to assess the effectiveness of their user guides and to improve them.
Note LiveDocs is not technical support. For technical issues, you should go to the Technical Support page on our site to view support options. |
One of the Help system's most useful features is its extensibility. You can add documents to the Help system by dragging and dropping them into the Help folder, either from the Files tab or Windows Explorer.
Help document files are generally in HTML, but you can include text files. The Help browser will use the file name as the title. You can also create a link from within an HTML file to files with txt, dtd, and pdf extensions if you use Internet Explorer as the internal browser. Web graphics files (GIF, JPG, PNG) are viewable in Help files.
This extensibility enables you to:
Note Documents do not display at the Help References root level, so you must either place them in an existing folder or create a new folder. |
You can add files or whole references (folders) to the Help reference tree.
A new folder with a highlighted name box appears.
The new folder appears at the bottom of the Help reference tree.
If you add a folder to the Help directory, the folder appears at the bottom of the Help reference tree. For most users, this is all you need.
If, however, you want to control the order in which the Help References display, you can edit the booktree.xml file in the Help root directory. The structure of the booktree file uses a simple tag set to configure how the Help displays on the book, chapter, and page levels. A quick study of the file will get you started.
The parser reads the booktree tags from top to bottom, so you can just insert folder and file tags where you want the references to appear in the Help tree. You can edit this file to rearrange existing Help content as well as to add custom folders and files to a specific location in the Help tree. Alternately, you can use the path
attribute in the book and chapter tags to specify the folder's location on your system.
Following is an example:
<help_book path="folder name">Custom Help Files
The new folder now appears in the order you set up, but the files in the folder appear in alphabetical order. If you want to control the order of chapters and pages, add tags in the booktree file for these entries and arrange them to be in your desired order.
Text files can be added to the Help reference tree. The Help browser default file type is HTML, so it looks for a TITLE
tag in each file. If it does not find one, or if the tag is empty, it displays the filename as the document's title in the Help tree.
To change an HTML file's title in the Help tree, edit the HTML file to complete its <title>
tag with the desired name.
To change a text file's title in the Help tree, first make a backup copy of the booktree.xml file in the Help root folder of your installation directory. Then open booktree.xml in the editor, find the <help_page>
tag for the text file, and add a title
attribute for the text file; for example, <help_page title="My Readme">.
You have considerable flexibility in adding supporting files (such as graphics, animations, video, and sound) to Help documents. There are two ways to do this:
Note If you are using the default internal browser or an older external browser, proper playback of media files is limited. |