GetHelp - Introduction

Introduction

HTML Documentation

HTML formatted documentation can quickly get a concept across to a user exploiting color, graphical images, animation, even sound and video. It can also seamlessly include web and email links. A detracting feature is that HTML documentation exists in its component parts as it was created, which is great for HTML coders, but painful for a user attempting to locate and extract information. You invariably ends up confronted with a directory full of smaller files - HTML and image files.

The end user doesn't need a bunch of small files, the browser does...

demo

GetHelp Concept

The goal of this project was simply to make HTML format help documents easier to manipulate on the Amiga. This is simply achieved by compressing and archiving all the document components into a single file, and configuring your Web Browser to recognise the archived document.

Wait! Doesn't that sound like the Amigaguide concept? Amigaguide has a lot of friends (myself included) because of its size, speed and the fact that it allows lots of pages in a single hypertext document. The GetHelp system allows you to treat an HTML document as just that - a single hypertext help file. Because its compressed, a GetHelp file will generally be much smaller than the equivalent Amigaguide file. Try constructing a '.help' file from an Amiguide document that has been converted to HTML using GuideML or equivalent tools. My PCDoom_FAQ.guide (386kB) has been superseded by PCDoom_FAQ.help (222kB).

This may make it easier to construct a comprehensive hypertext linked help system on the Amiga, referencing each document with a single click and navigating in a browser environment - hope the included example documentation demonstrates the possibilities and generates some feedback!!

All browsers allow a simple text search of the currently loaded page. The GetHelp system now includes a global document search utility which will generate a report listing each page of the document that generates a match. Please note this has only been tested and configured for IBrowse.

There is no installer required for this installation, just follow the manual installation steps. Once you have completed the installation, you can open a help document like GetHelp or GuideML from your browser and delete the docs drawer forever ;)