NewView is a replacement for... View.exe, the original
naff OS/2 help viewer.
Major enhancements are:
New user interface (split window with contents always available)
Select and copy direct from window. Including keyboard selection
Remembers size & position
Most recently used files list
Smooth scrolling display
Always see where in contents current doc is
Loads file into memory instead of leaving it open
Can go forward as well as back in history
Various options (colours, fonts etc)
Annotate help files - notes are displayed within topic
Fully resizeable even with multi-windows
More search options.
Installation
------------
Unzip into a directory, which can be in the path if you want.
NewView does not use any additional DLLs.
The usual HELP and BOOKSHELF environment variables are used.
Using NewView
-------------
Basically the same as View.
You can load files from the command line, or open them within
the program. Command line loading includes the multi-file,
environment variable handling of View, so for example
NewView cpref
loads the Control Program reference.
You can also load multiple files with the GUI - use ctrl or
shift to select multiple files.
Well, the rest of it should be fairly obvious, I hope ;-)
What's Still To Do
------------------
Quite a bit; some examples:
- Global search
- Fonts specified in file
- Printing
- Internationalisation
- Bookmarks
One possibly incredibly difficult thing would be to make NewView work as part of OS/2's context sensitive application help i.e. not only could it be used to view standalone documents but also within applications. This probably involves DDE and other scary
things not to mention lots more undocumented stuff.
What things DOES it display?
--------------------------------
Contents
Index
Text
Links
Bitmaps
Styles & alignments
Examples (fixed-width, no right margin)
Multiple windows*
* Window Handling:
Since it is not designed in the MDI (Multi-document interface) model,
NewView has to do some odd things to handle multiple windows as they
are specified for View. The results seems to be generally acceptable, but
this depends on sub-windows not being listed in the contents tree.
This is the case for the OS/2 Toolkit docs, the main examples of multiwindow
usage.
License
-------
NewView is freeware, and probably GPL'd too
Acknowledgements
----------------
My main contribution has been a rich text display control written from scratch. Most of the hard work of decoding the INF file format was done by others...:
Cristiano Guadagnino
(cristiano.guadagnino@usa.net or criguada@tin.it)
Author of WarpHelp - hope I haven't annoyed you by doing my own thing, I wanted to see something happen. Cheers for the inspiration to get started!
Peter Fitzsimmons (pfitz@ican.net)
For the original INF bitmap decompression code used in Inf2HTML. Thanks Peter! I managed to port it without fully understanding it... :-)
