Help files

# How help files are made

Help files are html. A fairly restricted subset of html, but html nevertheless.

<HTML>
  You encase a helpfile with this and </HTML>
<HEAD>
  Like a web page, header information, like META and TITLE, goes in this section.
<TITLE>
  The titlebar for the display window comes from this section.
<Hx>
  Various types of headers. For the text helpfile driver, headers H1 and H2 are boldface uppercase, H3 and H4 are boldface, and the rest are simply as is.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
  Indented 4 spaces, width 8 spaces narrower.
<P>
  A paragraph. You can use ALIGN=LEFT, ALIGN=RIGHT, or ALIGN=CENTER to line it up the way you want.
<CENTER>
  A shortcut for <P ALIGN=CENTER>
<A>
  The traditional navigation tag. The helpfile driver does not understand html: and ftp: urls, just the file: url.
<BR>
  put in a linebreak.
<PRE>
  Do preformatted text.
<DL>
  A html definition list, with items introduced with <DT> and item descriptions introduced with <DD>
<HR>
  Horizontal rules. WIDTH= is supported, though only percentage widths are supported.
<B>, <I>, <TT>
  Set the font to bold, italic, or typewriter.

> NOTE: The help object supported by ndialog is currently not even slightly flexible. Any misplaced tag will lead to your rendered help document looking very bizarre. One things to look out for are to make certain that all <P> and </P> tags are matched and don't nest funnily.

Written March 1998 by David Parsons