Creating Effective JavaHelp

Chapter 2. Creating Your First HelpSet

Now that you have a basic understanding of how JavaHelp works, it’s time to build a small HelpSet. The purpose of this chapter is to give you some practical experience with JavaHelp before you study it in more detail. This chapter is “hands on”: it walks you through the development process without lengthy explanations of the concepts behind it. The rest of this book then expands on the procedures you learn here, providing the detailed information you need to thoroughly understand JavaHelp development.

The HelpSet you’ll build in this chapter—we’ll call it MyJavaHelp—is even simpler than the Aviation sample introduced in Chapter 1. But the procedures for building it are nearly the same as those for building a more complex HelpSet.

To best understand the structure of HelpSet data and navigation files, you should create them on your own. However, since the topic files are in basic HTML format, you might want to simply download the file set from this book’s web page instead of creating them all from scratch: use the examples at http://examples.oreilly.com/creatingjavahelp.

At the end of this chapter, you will have a functioning JavaHelp system. To get you there, this chapter provides procedures to guide you through the following JavaHelp development processes:

• Creating the HelpSet’s directory structure

• Creating HelpSet data and navigation files

• Creating help topic files

• Checking your work

• Testing the finished HelpSet

Creating the HelpSet’s Directory Structure ...