🚀 go-pugleaf

Am I missing something, or is it incredibly clumsy to add Help to your 
application with IB's Help Builder? If I want to add help to a menu item
called Wombat, for instance, I go through the following steps:

1) Go into Edit and create the help file. Resize the window to the same size
   as Help Bulder and save it as Objects/Wombat.rtf.

2) Edit Index.rtfd and add entry for Wombat. Set the link to the file
   Objects/Wombat.rtf. (You need some way to bring up Wombat.rtf from within
   Help Builder). There's also some mysterious rule about a hidden file
   called Prolog.rtf.

3) IB doesn't realize that Index.rtfd has been edited, so quit and reload
   the nib file. (Note: IB doesn't remember your current directory).

4) In IB, bring up the Help Builder panel and click on Index, then click on
   the newly created Wombat entry.

5) Select the Wombat menu item and click the "Attach File to Selection"
   button.

What could be simpler? :-| Of course it's easier to do a whole batch of
them. Why can't you edit the Help text from inside IB? That's the convenience
of having this rtf functionality inside the Text object. At least you can
select the filename in the Inspector and do "Services/Open in Workspace".

Has anybody worked out how to create a Help.store file? I wonder why NeXT
chose not to let us use this feature.

I did try to keep the same "look and feel" as the standard NeXT help for
my menu items, but after copying and pasting one of their files I discover
that simply to have some text with black or grey background, they use TIFF
files! Yuk. There's no way to easily edit one of those. I'm sure they must
use some sort of program to automatically create these TIFF files rather
than creating them by hand. Again, it would be helpful to have this program.

No wonder so few NeXT apps have implemented Help.

[Ob. positive note: the new Edit/Gdb interaction is superb!]

Dave Griffiths