MacOS X Developer Preview 4 Release Notes Copyright © 2000 by Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
There are two ways to view the Help content provided with this Developer Preview in the HelpViewer. You can launch the HelpViewer via the Help menu in the Finder and various other applications, or you can navigate to the /System/Applications directory and double-click on the HelpViewer application.
If you're used to using the Help Viewer that appeared in Mac OS 9, you'll notice some differences between that application and the one on Mac OS X. If you are using this release of HelpViewer to aid in your development of help content for your product, you should keep in mind that AppleGuide is not supported on Mac OS X.
If you are developing help content and would like to have the HelpViewer display that content, you must place the content in the /System/Documentation/Help directory. The structure of this content remains roughly the same as that of content on previous versions of the Mac OS. Your TOC file, however, must be named with a ".htm" suffix, and any index files must be named with an "idx" at the end of the filename. (A space, followed by "idx", is the default file naming convention used by the indexing tool, which will work fine in this scenario.)
Please note that where help content is stored, how it is created and arranged, naming conventions for help-related files, and other aspects of help content for Mac OS X are subject to change.
The HelpViewer is capable of searching help content. For your content to be searchable, you must index that content using the Apple Help Indexing Tool, provided on the Apple Help 1.2 SDK. As noted above, all indices must have filenames ending in "idx".
Much of the information that applies to creating help content for Mac OS 8.6 and later applies to creating content for the HelpViewer in the Mac OS X Developer Preview. Content authors that have pre-existing help content may only have to change a few filenames and make sure their content is in the right place in the system to have the HelpViewer display that content. Authors interested in creating new content should consult the Apple Help 1.2 SDK for more information on how to get started.
Please note that this SDK was designed for use on pre-Mac OS X systems, and as such, it is recommended that you download it in your Classic.app environment, or using a computer other than the one you have installed the Mac OS X Developer Preview on. Not all information included in this SDK does or will apply to Help systems and content on Mac OS X.
Consult the Mac OS Help page on Apple's developer website for more information on help systems on different versions of the Mac OS. You'll also find links to help-related mailing lists here.
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Problem
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Printing of content does not work properly, and has been disabled in this release. |
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Description
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Because printing is known not to work, the printing-related menu items in the File menu have been disabled. |
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Workaround
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There is no workaround at this time. |
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Problem
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HTML content that is not HTML 3.2 compliant may cause a system hang. |
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Description
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The HTML Rendering Library, which the HelpViewer uses to render help content, can handle only HTML 3.2, minus forms and Javascript. In this release of Mac OS X, its behavior with HTML that does not meet this specification is unpredictable, and may result in rapid and prolonged swapping and an eventual system hang. |
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Workaround
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Verify your help content using any of of the number of HTML 3.2 verifiers available for the Macintosh. There is one built into BBEdit, and also a shareware one called MacTidy. |