5.1 On-line help

   This report has been written in L^ATEX with using additional commands that have been defined in order to make it possible to automatically prepare electronic versions of this document, which in turn can be viewed by one of the two browsers, namely Netscape and zHelp. Such an approach has several advantages:

• The on-line help is based on an automatically generated electronic version of the corresponding documentation, therefore it is easy to keep the on-line help consistent with a hard copy version of the documentation.
• The on-line help can be viewed by Netscape (which is commonly used on both MS-Windows and Unix installations) and/or by zHelp (portable browser which is distributed with this application). Due to the limitations of zHelp (which does not support the full implementation of the HTML) the functionality of the corresponding version of the on-line help is slightly limited.
• Additional commands for L^ATEX define labels which are automatically associated with corresponding pages of the on-line help. These associations are converted into a dictionary, which is distributed with the on-line help. This makes it possible to implement a context-sensitive help, i.e., controlling loading of appropriate pages by the software. However, the context sensitive help is combined with providing the user with a freedom of reading any part of the electronic version of the documentation.

 

Figure 4: Main menu of the application with the selection of an on-line help.

 

Figure 5: Dialog for the selection of a help browser.

 

Figure 6: Welcome page of the on-line help viewed by the Netscape browser.

 

Figure 7: Information about availability of context sensitive help.

 

Figure 8: Welcome page of the on-line help viewed by the zHelp browser.

Figure 4 illustrates the way of activating the on-line help. The subsequently displayed dialog shown in Figure 5 provides a choice between the Netscape and the zHelp browsers. Note that one can use both browsers (by loading them one after another). The welcome pages of both browsers are shown in Figures 6 and 8, respectively. Additionally the information illustrated in Figure 7 is displayed before the zHelp browser is shown, if the context sensitive help is enabled for a particular application.

The welcome pages of each browser contain a summary of information pertaining to the use of a particular browser. The use of both browsers is easy and intuitive and therefore no more details about navigating through the on-line help is provided here.

Janusz Granat	- Institute of Control and Computation Engineering
Marek Makowski	- International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis