It is public domain. This means it may be distributed freely on the condition that:
a. no money is made from it although a small charge may be made for duplication and p+p.
b. No files are deleted, altered or added with the exception of the AppHelp file. (See later)
The only part of the HyperHelp application which may be changed is the AppHelp file.
The contents of the directory should be:
{C!Boot, !Help, !Run, Templates, !Sprites,
{CSprites, !RunImage, AppText, HelpText
HyperHelp is supplied as is. Therefore no guarantee is given or implied as to its fitness for purpose. The author can not be held responsible for any loss of data, time or money due to the use of HyperHelp.
{03Using HyperHelp
HyperHelp is simplicity itself to use, but I would say that wouldn't I.
To advance a page simply click on the right hand arrow at the top of the window. To go back a page click on the left hand arrow. If either of the arrows is greyed out you have reached on end of the document and may not go further.
Any text highlighted with bright green may be clicked on to jump to a different page in the text.
If, at any point, you want to retrace your steps you can click on the "Go back" icon. It is situated next to the left hand arrow. This will allow you to retrace up to five steps through the pages. If this icon is greyed out then you have retraced your maximum five steps and may not go further back.
If you bring up the HyperHelp menu you can select the name of the page you
wish to go to using the contents option. Open the contents sub-menu and select the page you require from the supplied list.
{04The HyperHelp story
This page explains why I wrote HyperHelp which is a good question and one I feel ill equipped to answer. However here goes.
Basically the reason HyperHelp was written was that all the help reader programs I found were shareware so I wrote this PD alternative. It is without doubt slower than its shareware counterparts however I feel it has a more comprehensive features list.
{05HyperHelp in use
If you wish to use HyperHelp in your latest programming masterpiece simply drag the HyperHelp directory into your applications directory. Now when the user clicks MENU over your application the 'Help' option will be available on the 'File' submenu. All that remains for you to do is edit the AppText file to hold your help text.
The text must be formatted in certain ways for it to be acceptable to HyperHelp. Below is the basic file structure.
HelpFile-2.11 - 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<String> - Start of page one and the page name.
<Text...> - {J06The text{J00. See later.
{{02<String> - Start of page two (if present) and the page name.
<Text...> - More text if present.
{{E
You must be careful when creating your text as HyperHelp can do strange things to your computer if it finds something it doesn't expect. I found this out when I lost my floppy drive icon and !Edit after a crash. A hard reset soon sorted it out though. The moral of this story is, of course, save before you try it out.
{06The Text
Hyper help is written so a document written in Edit using a work area of 77 characters will be faithfully reproduced in HyperHelp. You must remember though, Edit can display a greater number of rows than HyperHelp. If you include more rows than HyperHelp can handle they just won't be displayed.
If you want to use the {{ character in your text you must enter it twice {{{{.
{07Control Codes
There are a number of control codes you may imbed in your text to achieve certain effects. They all start with opening curly brackets. ({{) Then there is a command character followed by the parameters if any.
So the question you are now asking is: What mega funky stuff can I do with these control characters?
The answer is: You can't do any mega funky stuff with them. What you can do however is listed below.
{{C - Centres the current line of text.
{{R - Right justifies the current line of text.
{{H<Integer between 0 and 15) - Change the colour of the current line of text. The numbers corresponds to those displayed when a colour is clicked on in the palette icon.
{{U<1-on, 0-off> - Underlining
{{B<1-on, 0-off> - Emboldening
{{J<Page number> - Hyper link to specified page. A {{J00 command must be used to mark the end of the link text.
All the commands last for one line and may not be continued over two lines.
{RSo that's how it's done. Have a play to see what they do.
{08Revision History
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 rewritten 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.
v1.70 (19 Jan 1994) - Now we have a cunning and useful contents menu.
v1.71 (27 Feb 1994) - Right Justification added and <Adjust> click to reverse arrow action.
v1.80 (5 Apr 1994) - Memory management altered. space for the document comes from application space and not module area now.
v1.81 (6 Apr 1994) - More memory management alterations. I have made the pointer system used a lot simpler.
v1.82 (11 Apr 1994) - Underlining and emboldening added.
{09Revision History
v2.00 (13 Apr 1994) - Hyper-linking added
v2.10 (16 Apr 1994) - Undo memory added.
v2.11 (19 Apr 1994) - Some small tweaks.
v2.12 (20 Apr 1994) - Further improvements to the memory management. (Beta test version)
v2.13 (22 Apr 1994) - Rewritten help text. More tweaking of code. First release version.
{U1Future developments{U0
I hope future versions will offer some of the follwing:
a. Machine code load and redraw routines for speed
b. Inclusion of sprites in documents
c. Printing of the document
{10Upkeep
If you find any bugs in this program or feel that your superior programming skill could be brought to bear on some of my code then please write to me:
