Common Authoring Tasks

General Remark

This section covers howto carry out all tasks related to authoring a helpset. It describes main features of JavaHelpTM and howto make use of JHelpDev to implement these features.

Please refer to the section Common Development Tasks if you want to know, how to incorporate your helpset in an application.

Guideline

I suggest the following steps to create a helpset:

  1. Create a new project.
  2. Create the table of contents without specifying the targets (they are not yet there), so that you have a structure right from the beginning. This allows you to define clearly howto organize your content.
  3. Write for each item in the TOC a HTML content file with an external tool. Remember to put it in a subdirectory of your project directory. Once it is created, you can do Create Map and connect the TOC item with the target.
  4. When you are finished with the contents, create the index entries. First collect the index entries for each target in the "Target Content View". Double click on the targets to see the content and try to find meaningful keywords for it. As a second step you might want to organize or sort the index items in the "Item Order View".
  5. You can always check the status of your helpset with View Help. Try to put yourself in the position of a user.

See also: Creating a New Project, Opening a Project