helpviewer(1)
NAME
helpviewer − OpenWindows viewer for online help
SYNOPSIS
helpviewer <help-handbook-file>
AVAILABILITY
helpviewer is available as part of OpenWindows Version 3.1 and the Solaris 2.1 operating system.
DESCRIPTION
helpviewer is an OpenWindows application for viewing and navigating on-line help documents. It is a PostScript-based viewer for displaying specially prepared help handbooks. Because documents are in PostScript format, they may contain high quality fonts and graphics, and will have the same appearance on-line as they do on the printed page.
Also, pages displayed in the helpviewer can be proportionally scaled to arbitrary sizes to increase legibility or minimize screen real-estate usage.
USAGE
Once a document is displayed in the helpviewer window, you can control your viewing of it in the following ways: Turn pages — Use the Next Page and Previous Page buttons on the helpviewer window, or use the following keys on Sun type-4 keyboards: PgUp [R9] (Previous Page), PgDn [R15] (Next Page), Home [R7] (to beginning of file), and End [R13] (to beginning of next file).
Go Back (History) — The helpviewer window keeps track of each page of each document visited. Click SELECT on the Go Back button until the window returns to the page you want to revisit, or use the Undo key [L4].
Follow Links — helpviewer has a simple hypertext mechanism. Links are displayed as rectangular outlines around words or graphics on a page. Double-clicking SELECT on a link causes helpviewer to display the document and page to which the link points. helpviewer hypertext links can also be used to initiate system processes, enabling an author to launch shell scripts and applications or communicate with other processes directly from a link in a document.
Magnify — Use the Magnify button menu to scale a page larger or smaller in increments of 10 percent or to specify a custom magnification percentage.
The Page Info menu item in the View button menu is always greyed out in the helpviewer.
ENVIRONMENT
HELPPATH
This environment variable must be set to the directories that contain help handbooks (e.g. $OPENWINHOME/lib/locale:$OPENWINHOME/lib/help). The helpviewer uses the $HELPPATH variable to locate PostScript files.
SEE ALSO
DIAGNOSTICS
helpviewer displays NeWS/PostScript error messages in the console.
NOTES
PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
NeWS is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
BUGS
helpviewer should be capable of viewing generic PostScript documents, but currently there are limitations on the kind of PostScript files it can handle.
The helpviewer hypertext link format is not documented.
SunOS 5.1 — Last change: 02 March 1992