NWE Help: Make Help Pages: Old Index File Format

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The helpinfo.text file has four basic parts. (View an example of a helpinfo file.)

1. Two lines of path and title information
2. Comments that precede the table of menu items
3. Table of menu items information (separated by %%%, and delimited by ::)
4. Comments that follow the table of menu items

Follow these rules:

1. Any line that starts with # is a comment.

2. The first two lines of the document (after any comments) are special path data:
   • Line One is the relative path for the document index. No trailing slash is needed.

   • Line two is the HTML title of the document. This title will be automatically preceded by path information.

3. The next (optional) portion of the document should be HTML text. It will precede the table of menu items.

4. The table of menu items takes this format:

   %%%
   pathname/::Item Name::Description of this item
   pathname/path.html::Item Name::Description
   /path/section/::Item Name::Description
   %%%

   Three percent signs (%%%) must precede and follow the table of menu items information.

   The path is assumed to be relative. It can be a directory or HTML document. If the path starts with a SLASH, it is assumed to be absolute to the top of the help tree (in our case /writing/help/). If it starts with http://, it is assumed to be an absolute URL and is not changed.

   Path data is separated from the Item Name and Description with two colons (::).

5. The final (optional) portion of the document should be HTML text. It will follow the table of menu items.