This program is ⌐ Matthew Hambley 1994. It is Public domain. That is it may be freely copied and no money should change hands for this program. A charge may be made for p&p and duplication.
This program is supplied as is and no guaranty is given or implied as to its fitnes for purpose. The author can accept no blame for loss of time, data or money cased by the use of this program.
The files contained in the !Help directory of version 1.60 are:
!Help is an application that displays a specially prepared text file in a desktop window. As simple as that.
It was written because I was annoyed that all the help display programs I found were shareware. So this is the PD equivalent. It is perhaps not as fast as the shareware ones but it is free so what do you expect.
{C{H11How to move about the pages
{C===========================
Well it's obvious isn't it? You click the right arrow to move through the pages and the left arrow to go back. If an arrow is grayed out then you have reached to end of the document and may not go further.
{03How to use Help
{C{H11Using !Help in your own programs
{C================================
Simply copy the !Help application into your application directory and the write your help into the AppHelp file. It realy is that easy. Now when a user clicks menu over your application there will be a help option in the Application menu. When this is clicked on !Help will load and the user is presented with your help file.
Over the page is a description of the file format. You must be very careful to adhere to it. If you get it wrong Help may crash or it may do odd things to your memmory, curruption any other work in progress. I descovered that whilst writing this very help file. I accidentaly missed out the H in a colour command and lost my filer window and the text in my text processor.
{C{H08You have been warned
{04How to use Help
{C{H11File format
{C===========
For all the people out there who wish to use the help program here is the format for the AppText file.
HelpFile-1.60 - This is a header and must be present
<Integer 1-99> - The number of pages.
<String 19 characters long max.> - The string to appear in the title bar.
{{01 - Start of page one.
<Text...> - The text. See later.
{{02 - Start of page two (if present)
<Text...> - More text if present.
{{E - End marker.
The text
--------
There are some important notes about the main text. The system is set up so that if a document looks all right in !Edit, in mode 12 it should be OK in Help. You must remember that Help shows slightly less than Edit does on one screen. Help will not crash if more than a screen of text is entered on one page but not all of the text will be displayed. If you want to use the {{ character it must be entered twice. (e.g. {{{{) This can cause trouble with the length of lines.
{05How to use Help
{C{H11Control Codes
{C=============
You may inbed control codes into the text for special functions. All control codes start with an opening curly bracket({{) followed by a number of parameters.
So the question you are now asking is: What mega funcy stuff can I do with these control characters?
The answer is: You can't do any mega funcy stuff with them. What you can do however is listed below.
{{C - Centre a line of text
{{H<integer between 0 and 15> - Change the colour of a line of text
So there you are, have a play to see what they do.
{06History
{C{H11Revision History
{C================
v1.00 - The first version. Slow and clumsy but it works. It redraws the whole window every time but you can't have perfection first time.
v1.50 - I have re-writen the redraw routine so now it only redraw the bit of the screen that needs doing. This is a major improvement.
v1.60 - You can now have centred text and colour.
v1.61 - Minute change made. You can now use just about any character in your text.
{07Upkeep
If you find any bugs in this program or feal that your superior programing skill could be brought to bear on some of my code then please write to me:
