Re: [Tads3] Eric Eve's Getting Started guide

["Mike Roberts" <mjr_@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doeadeer3@aol.com wrote:
> I've reuploaded [DM3 as a WinHelp file] to another site, and downloaded it 
> to check it's whole.
Thanks again - I've had a look at it.  This looks to me like a pretty 
straightforward functional mapping from HTML-style documentation, in that 
it's basically a bunch of hyperlinked pages, each containing a mix of styled 
text and graphics.  It has some internal navigation metadata that aren't 
normally part of HTML (in that there's a specially designated page that's 
the table of contents, and pages are sequentially ordered).  There's also 
the search and index capabilities of the viewer.

I believe the source material I'll be preparing for the new manual will 
include all of this information.  In fact, my plan is for the HTML rendition 
to implement the same extra navigational functions (next/prev page, TOC, 
index) as in-page or in-frame hyperlinks.  So, it seems to me that it should 
be possible in principle to create a generator that translates from my 
source format to WinHelp automatically; it should be able to do a very good 
job without post-production manual tweaking, since it should have enough 
information going in to do the job right to start with.  I'm not sure I'll 
have the time or energy to write this generator myself, but maybe I can find 
a collaborator at some point who'd be interested in building it.  As I 
mentioned earlier, the more contemporaneous this effort is with the writing 
of the manual, the better the results are likely to be - if anyone is 
sufficiently motivated, let me know and I can explain my plans in more 
detail.

--Mike

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