West Wind Html Help Builder 4.0
Creating your first new topic
West Wind Html Help Builder 4.0
Creating your first new topic
Start by highlighting the parent topic in the Tree display - in this case the West Wind Web Monitor root topic. Right click and select New Topic or press Alt-N, or use the New Topic toolbar button. You'll see the New Topic Wizard pop up.
You get a few options in this dialog:
Help Builder uses Topic Types to drive how specific groups of topics are displayed. This customizable and extensible list of types maps to HTML templates that render each type of topic. The default types are: HEADER, TOPIC, CLASSHEADER, CLASSMETHOD, CLASSPROPERTY, CLASSEVENT etc. In this case we want to create a plain content topic so choose TOPIC.
You can choose the topic that this topic is relative to. By default this will be the currently selected topic, but you may change this to any topic in the drop down list which contains all topics of the help file (currently only one) or by using the Topic Selection Tool which provides a tree list and search functionality to select a single topic.
Next you need to decide how this topic should be created relative to the topic you just selected. In this case we want the System Requirements topic to sit underneath the Root topic, so we choose Insert Topic as child of the current topic. You can also create topics at the same level as the current topic or on the root level.
Click next and you'll be prompted for a title for this new topic.
Click on Next and Finish to create the new topic. The content view should now show the new topic below your index topic:
Notice the dot next to the new topic. This means that the topic body currently has no content in it. It's meant as a reminder that you have work to do on this topic. The dot also shows when a topic is marked for follow-up.
The new topic pops up in Edit mode automatically so you're ready to start entering text into the topic immediately. Remember you can always switch between Edit and HTML view by pressing Alt-V or by clicking on the Text or Preview icons on the toolbar.
Clicking on the Preview Icon switches back into HTML view inside of the IDE. The Internet Explorer Icon fires up a separate Internet Explorer Window so you can edit and view your text simultaneously (just press CTRL-S to save your changes and refresh the view).
The topic we are creating here is very simple so we're simply going to type text into the Body area of the entry form.
You simply type into the text area - the text you type is considered formatted HTML. This means it assumes you're typing plain text and don't worry about HTML formatting. Help Builder takes your plain text and fixes it up for HTML display. You can also embed custom HTML tags into the text as shown by the < <b> > tags in the text above. Rather than using standard HTML double markup tags are used to facilitate including HTML and XML in your actual topic content for display rather than evaluating it.
Most common markup operations can be accomplished through the format toolbar which provides options for Bold, Italic, color options, formatted code and HTML/XML, as well justification and lists. Once the text has been entered you can now preview the topic immediately.
Note that the topic is fully formatted. We get the West Wind Web Monitor header and the System Requirements title on the page. The bottom of the page shows a Date stamp which is a standard footer. We didn't type this stuff, so where is it coming from?
Each topic type (TOPIC, HEADER, CLASSHEADER, CLASSMETHOD etc.) in Help Builder is driven by a matching HTML Topic template (or they can use a default template) and this 'extra' content you see on this page comes out of the template. So, the TOPIC type has a matching TOPIC.WCS file which is an HTML file that contains HTML containing some markup tags that describe the content to display.
The idea behind this concept is simple: You get a consistent design for your help file, without having to create the same headers and text over and over on every page. This lets you focus on creating content rather than having to worry about the help file's layout. Of course the customizable and you can use any text editor to make changes to the layout which will be reflected immediately in any topic using the changed template.
Let's start adding more topics by creating a new topic tree for the Web Monitor documentation.