Application Help

Overview

Application Help is the content that is shown when a user presses the <F1> key on the keyboard at any place in the application or on choosing an item in the 'Help' Menu of OpenPetra.

At this point in time, there is no Application Help for OpenPetra.

Goals of OpenPetra Application Help

Content

• Should provide instructions and answers on how to use OpenPetra effectively.
• Should be integrated into the OpenPetra application in a way that allows context-sensitive launching of content.
  • This would mean that on pressing the <F1> key on the keyboard or on choosing an item in the 'Help' Menu of OpenPetra, different content is shown depending on where the user is currently in the application:
    • if the user is currently in the Partner Edit screen: show help for Partner Edit screen.
    • if the user is currently in the Gift Batch screen: show help for Gift Batch screen.

Portable

• Help Content should be viewable on any operating system using any modern web browser.
• Help Content should have a JavaScript search facility which allows full-text searching in the Application Help. This will need to work offline!

Authoring of Help File Content

In this wiki

The plan is to write the content of the Application Help here in the wiki, and to then automatically create HTML files from that (see 'Creation of Help Files' below).

Start page for the actual content of the Application Help

TODO: instructions about how to organise chapters, topics, screenshots etc

Creation of Help Files

The content of the wiki pages from page Start page for the actual content of the Application Help onwards will first need to be exported in an automated way and end up in an intermediate format (quite possibly DocBook). From that intermediate format HTML files will need to be generated. This will make it possible to view the Application Help Content on any operating system using any modern web browser. The HTML files should have a JavaScript search facility which also works offline.

TODO: Details

Possible Alternative: FLOSS Manuals

See FLOSS Manuals

For Reference Only: History of MS Windows Application Help

At this point we don't intend to produce MS Windows Help files because they are not portable, i.e. they don't work on other operating systems than MS Windows. However, for reference we put some information about MS Windows Help files here:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_WinHelp (.hlp)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help (.chm)
  • compiles HTML files into a chm file
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Help_2: (.hxs), used with Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005/2008 and Office 2007
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Help_System: (.mshc), used with Visual Studio 2010
  • http://www.helpware.net/mshelp3/intro.htm
  • plain html files, index will be generated by the viewer. TOC and index are defined by using meta tags.
• see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Assistance_Markup_Language