Updated 2018-08-23 13:11:22 by bll

"A Hypertext Help System" builds upon A little hypertext system and adds more markdown features along with a TOC.

"A little hypertext system" - with an improved version in htext.

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HelpSystem

Steve Landers has begun using a Wikit for a hypertext help system. To learn more, start up a copy of a current (empty) wikit and look at its Adding Help to Scripted Documents page.

Keith Vetter's SpiroGraph embeds a "nicely done" (according to David Welton) "simple dialog for help".

See the iwidgets hyperhelp widget: hyperhelp

Some people have balloon help (tooltips) in mind as the canonical help model.

RamDebugger has a help system based in tkhtml where the help is included as html files in a directory tree. Supports full search.

How to Define Hooks for Context Sensitive Help

Would Notebook be a good basis for a Tk help system?

Christian Werner's winhelp [1] simplifies interaction between Tk applications and the native Windows help system infrastructure.

Kevin Walzer's tclAppleHelp extension provides a hook to load HTML files into Apple's built-in help system from Tcl programs.

unixhelp

The GRIDPLUS2 text widget [2] is a simple way to create hyperlink/help text. See [3] for an example application.

A Minimal Hypertext Help System

TkWebView has a procedure that defines a simple help viewer.

WISH User Help is the world's simplest hypertext help system (as far as the author knows, anyway).

bll 2018-8-23: BallroomDJ includes a help program that reads the help text from a file that has sort-of-wiki-type styling for headings, italics, bold, bold italics, images, line breaks, tabs (fixed position), tags and internal links to other topics in the help file.

I use the tabs and line breaks to create simple table displays. Or just line breaks to create a simple list.

The tags are not only used for the internal links, but also used to automatically build a table of contents and when the program is run, a tag can be supplied to position the help for context-sensitive help. The tags have an associated level and the level is reflected in the table of contents treeview.

Now, this help program is currently loosely tied into BallroomDJ, but it's not too difficult to detach (it used to be a stand-alone program). I can help with that process if you are interested, as I know what pieces need to be removed/replaced.

A sample of the help text file can be seen at: https://sourceforge.net/p/ballroomdj/code/ci/default/tree/bdjdata/bdjhelp.txt