GUI ScreenIO for Windows

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Using HTML for Documentation

You can use standard HTML files to document your application.  If you are familiar with designing a website for the Internet, you can create documentation for your application using the same tools and techniques.

Invoking Help

When the user presses the F1 key, GUI ScreenIO will launch the user's web browser, open the HTML file for the current panel (and language), and attempt to position the page to the entry for the currently active control.

Multiple Language Support

GUI ScreenIO's help launcher will launch the HTML file for the language that is currently selected.  

Cascading Style Sheets

The Help Generator formats your help text using standard HTML tags.  It also inserts a link to a cascading style sheet named GSHELP.CSS, which will apply a consistent style to your documentation when it is displayed. 

We provide several style sheets you can experiment with to obtain the format you prefer for your automatically generated documentation.  You can easily alter the font, colors, and several other formatting variables by modifying the cascading style sheet.

Creating HTML using GUI ScreenIO's Help Generator

Write your documentation

You define the text in the panel editor by right-clicking the item of interest, and selecting Edit Help... from the context menu.

The text for the Help Generator will be stored as a special entry in the comments of your panel copybook. 

Generate the HTML files

Close all of your panels, then select File/Help Generator from the panel editor's main menu.  Specify the locations for the source panel copybooks, and where you want the output files to be written.

Select Simple HTML as the Output Format.

Choose how you will select the panels to be included in your documentation, then press the "Compile Selected" button.  This will create an HTML file for every panel you selected, that contains help text.  If you did not define any help text for an item, nothing will be generated for that item.

Creating custom HTML documentation

If your application requires more elaborate documentation than that provided by the automated Help Generator (for example, if you want to include images, tables, and other more complex objects in your documentation), you can manually create documentation in a way that can be integrated with GUI ScreenIO's help launcher.

You can use any HTML editor to manually develop your HTML documents.  We used the Microsoft FrontPage HTML editor to develop this documentation.

Integrating custom HTML with GUI ScreenIO

This section explains how to cause GUI ScreenIO to load the correct HTML file when the user presses the F1 key.  If you use the Help Generator, this is done for you automatically.

Naming HTML files so that they are loaded automatically

In order to have GUI ScreenIO automatically load the HTML file that applies to the current panel when the user presses the F1 key, the HTML file must have the same name as the panel, plus a suffix of the current language ID. 

Therefore, for a panel named MYPANEL and for language ID 01, the HTML file will be named, MYPANEL01.HTM. 

Specifying associative links to position to text for a control

If you wish to have the page automatically scrolled to the location of the text for the active control, you must define an associative link in the HTML document at that point.  If you use Microsoft FrontPage, you define a bookmark

You can also insert the link manually in your HTML, like this: 

<a name="FTnnnn">

where nnnn is the control's ID number. 

The easiest way to find the number of a control is to define some help for it, then use the Help Generator to create the HTML file for that panel.  Open the HTML file with a text editor and inspect it to find the link that is defined for the control of interest.

Generally, custom HTML would not contain many control-specific links, because it can be difficult to maintain them if you add or delete controls from the panels in your application.  If you need control-specific help, consider using the generated help.

Disadvantages of HTML documents

One of the disadvantages of using only HTML for your documentation is that your documentation will consist of many small HTML files. 

You can easily consolidate all of your HTML documentation into a single file (and add indexing and full-text search capabilities) by converting your HTML files into Microsoft HTML Help


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