HelpViewer
HelpViewer is an application for viewing, scanning, printing, compressing, expanding, verifying, compacting, and comparing the NEXTSTEP on-line help of other applications.
Viewing, Scanning, and Printing NEXTSTEP On-line Help
With HelpViewer, you can open any application that sports NEXTSTEP on-line help, view the help (handy when you don't have a license key for a particular app, or when you want to know what an unknown app is all about before launching it), scan the help, and print the help (as a whole, or just selected chapters or pages), with help links replaced by page numbers.
- optional auto-scanning of all hidden files (like those for Menus, Commands, or Panels)
- customizable appearance of the Table of Contents
- auto-chaptering according to the Table of Contents' structure
- customizable header & footer lines can include chapter titles and subtitles
- various page numbering schemes available
- customizable appearance of link-replacing page numbers
Detection of Erroneous Help Links and Help Markers
Attention developers! Besides using HelpViewer to generate printed documentation for your own application if you don't want to write an extra hard-copy manual, you can use HelpViewer to locate and correct any erroneous help links or help markers that might hang around unnoticed in your own application's help. HelpViewer's scanning engine detects:
- help links to nonexistent help files,
- help links to nonexistent markers within existing help files, and
- duplicate marker definitions within the same help file.
You can view erroneous help links and markers in HelpViewer.app, or, if your app's help source directory is located on your host, you can view and correct links and markers directly in the respective help source files with Edit.app.
Integrated Help Compander
With HelpViewer's integrated Help Compander tool (introduced in version 1.2) you can compress and expand NEXTSTEP on-line help.
Users can expand an application's compressed on-line help into a help folder in original source code form, perform certain automatic repair actions or manual modifications, and compress the help folder back into the application's on-line help.
Developers can bypass the ProjectBuilder application completely, and let the Help Compander perform all required steps to generate the Help.store file, including a final verification to detect the infamous compresshelp bug.
- expand help stores to help folders
- compress help folders to help stores
- verify the contents of help stores
- detect damaged files
- check and repair find by keyword functionality
- verify the contents of help folders
- remove useless files
- detect missing help files
- verify RTFD integrity
- automatically create/update .index.store files
- reduce the disk space required by help folders to about 50%
- compare different versions of a help folder (in a far more suitable way than FileMerge can)
Price
US $39 HelpViewer Standard Edition
US $99 HelpViewer Extended Edition (includes the Help Compander tool)
HelpViewer requires NEXTSTEP version 3.2 or later, or OPENSTEP 4.x for Mach.
Free time-limited test license keys available.
FTP Download
The most recent version of HelpViewer can be downloaded from this FTP archive:
ftp://ftp.peanuts.org/pub/comp/platforms/next/Commercial/tools/apps/