Re:Winhelp

[digitome@xxxxxx (Sean Mc Grath)]

<Paul_Prescod>
The problem is that James has to do
the up-front work to make it happen, which I would recommend if we are
95% of the way there, but not if WinHelp-RTF is a wildly different
language from "Jade-RTF". I would have *guessed* that WinHelp RTF is a
subset of the RTF that is produced by Jade, but that would be a big leap
of faith based on the logic of the "RTF family"'s organization.
</Paul_Prescod>

For my sins [:-)] I have done a fair amount of SGML->winhelp stuff and know
the RTF winhelp chews pretty well. I would imagine that the "out of the box"
RTF backend for  JADE already does a goodly portion of what is required.

The key RTF "formatting" features that achieve winhelp semantics are:-

1) Footnotes.
'#' footnote == Context String == Link end
'$' footnote == Title
'K' footnote == Keyword
'+' footnote == Browser sequence (i.e. forward ./ next buttons)

2) Hypertext
A jump is coded as <text to highlight><context string> where <text to
highlight> is 
formatted with double underline and <context string> is "hidden" text.

Popups are almost identical except that the <text to highlight> is single
underline. 
3) Misc
"Page Break" == Topic Break
"Keep with next" == Non scrolling Region (must immediately follow a page break)

That is the guts of it. The rest is limitations - brain dead tables, no full
text justification,
no super/sub scripts etc. etc. etc. For all its limitations, Winhelp (and its
big brother Multimedia Viewer) are two of the unsung heros of Windows software
IMHO.

Cheers
Sean Mc Grath

sean@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Digitome Electronic Publishing
http://www.digitome.com


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