Creating JavaHelp with Help & Manual 4

By Steve Butler
September 4, 2005

Original article link

 

This tutorial describes using HM2JHelp, a free utility by Steve Butler with which you can use Help & Manual's output source files for HTML Help (.CHMs) to create JavaHelp. The tutorial is by Steve, I'm just posting it in the Tutorials & Guides section for him.

Note that HM2JHelp has been optimized for H&M4 but it also works with H&M3.


Introduction

Creating JavaHelp using HM4 is very straightforward and does not require any special changes to your normal authoring techniques.

To create the JavaHelp, you will need a copy of HM2JHelp. This can be freely obtained from http://hm2jhelp.sourceforge.net/. Download the standard zip file and extract to your harddisk. If you have Java correctly installed, you should be able to double click on the HM2JHelp.jar file to launch the application. If this does not work, there is an HM2JHelp.bat batch file that you can edit to launch the application.

Creating your help files

HM2JHelp works from the HTML files that are created when you compile HTML Help from within HM4. The program reads in the HTML Help project file *.hhp and then uses this, coupled with the index and contents files to create the JavaHelp. HM2JHelp will attempt to create an equivalent TOC, index and full text search facility from the files.

Because the program works with the temporary files created when you make HTML help from Help and Manual, make sure you uncheck the option Delete temporary files after compilation when you compile your HTML help.

You shouldn't have to make many changes to your normal files but there are a couple of specific points to note.

Popups

HM2JHelp can create popup topics but you will need to have configured these for HTML help within HM4. To do this, from the HM4 menu, select Project > Project Properties and then expand the HTML Help section. Select the Popup Topics section. You can use either Text only popups or JavaScript popups.

Objects

JavaHelp does not directly support embedded objects such as AVIs and Flash. You can either use HM4 conditional output options to remove them or you can customise HM2JHelp to replace the objects with your own text. This is achieved by modifying the objects.properties file. This is explained in more detail on the HM2JHelp website.

Once you have created the temporary files you can launch HM2JHelp to create the JavaHelp.

Creating JavaHelp

Now the temporary HTM files are in place, launch the HM2JHelp application.

  1. Click on the Source File button and browse to find the *.hhp file in the temporary file location ~tmpchm.

  2. Click on the Target Folder button to choose a folder into which to save the JavaHelp.

  3. Click on Build.
The program will now process the HTML Help hpp file and create the JavaHelp files in the target folder. The table of contents, index and full text search will be automatically created.

Customisation

It is possible to customise the output from HM2JHelp by editing a number of properties files. Details are given on the website.