
                    HTML Help System for FreeDOS
                    ============================
                    Version 1.0.5 / 1.0.6 / 1.0.7 / 1.0.8
                     1 July 2004  / 30 March 2009 / November 2020


See also the files COPYING, BUGS and HISTORY.

Contents
--------
0 What's New
1 Introduction
2 Copyrights
3 Usage
4 Contacts
5 Building HTML Help Viewer
6 How to include new HTML files
7 HTML Tags supported by the Viewer
8 Acknowledgements

0 What's New
------------
The replacement help content is here!
Included is:

- A new version of the help viewer: version 5.3.3
 
- the html file set, (hhstndrd 1.0.6), has
  various updates and fixes.

1 Introduction
--------------
This is the FreeDOS clone of the MS-DOS 6.22 help command.

Features include

   * uses html - a widely available format
   * support for compressed help (zip format)
   * easy-to-use user interface
   * search dialog box
   * International features, include UTF-8 encoding support,
     NLS string translation, and all Latin-1 character entities

2 Copyrights
------------
The HTML Help viewer is Copyright (c) Express Software 1998-2003,
protected under the Express Software Public License Agreement (see the
file COPYING).

The HTML Help content is a set of many files with various copyrights.
The license for most of them is the GNU Free Documentation License,
the licenses for all others are in the same spirit as the GNU FDL.
Type "HELP fdl" for more information


3 Usage
-------
To start the interactive help viewer (found in /bin) just type:

   HELP

and the contents page will be displayed. The standard set of html files
can be browsed from here. To search for help on a particular
topic, simply type:

   HELP [topic]

You can give a file name:

   HELP [filename]
   HELP /Lfilename

If the /L switch is generally faster; with /L help won't check whether
the filename is a topic first. To completely override the /help folder,
use the /O switch:

   HELP /O[x:][path][filename]

For more information on using help, type

   HELP help

or

   HELP /?


4 Contacts
----------
The FreeDOS website:
       http://www.freedos.org

FreeDOS discussion list:
       fd-dev - AT -topica.com

The maintainer:
       Rob Platt (worldwiderob - AT -yahoo.co.uk)

The original developer of the viewer program:
      Joe Cosentino (onehardmarine - AT - attbi.com)

The actual maintainer of the help files:
      W. Spiegl (fritz.mueller - AT - mail.com)


5 Building the HTML Help viewer
-------------------------------
The help.exe binary is included for those who do not wish to modify help.

It was built with "Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS", MASM, and TLINK, and uses
Borland's Make.

TASMHELP.MAK is included for those with the TASM assembler, but this hasn't
been tested for a bit. CONIO.OBJ should have been included with the source
code, so it is not necessary for you to have an assembler unless you wish to
modify the low level video (which is in conio.asm).

HELP.PRJ is a "Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS" project file. It is now set up for
optimised code.

To debug:  Switch Source Debugging "ON" in the debugger options menu,
and also set the compiler to include debug info in object files in the
advance compiler options menu.

To release a new verion, runs the GNU indent program on the source code,
to reformat it to the FreeDOS coding conventions. Then move the exe file
to the bin directory of the distribution. Delete all object files other than
CONIO.OBJ.

Links to the indent program and public domain version of MASM can be
found at:

   http://projects.freedos.net/htmlhelp


6 How to include new HTML files
-------------------------------
If you wish to contribute to the help files, write a translation etc,
you should first make contact by mailing the FreeDOS discussion forum,
fd-dev@topica.com or to the maintainer at worldwiderob - AT - yahoo.co.uk

There is a set of guidelines for authors in the html help content,
listed under the miscellaneous section of index.htm.


7 HTML Tags supported by the Viewer
-----------------------------------
You can get to the file:

   HELP\HHSTNDRD\AUTHORS\TAGS.HTM

from the Authors' Resources section in the hhstndrd file set.

8 Acknowledgements
------------------

The ZIP support uses some neat code created by Gilles Vollant (MINIZIP)
combined with the powerful ZLIB compression library.
See
    www.winimage.com/zLibDll/unzip.htm
    www.zlib.org

It also uses the catgets library written by Jim Hall.
