Markdown2Help

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Markdown2Help is part of the CategoryAplTree project.

Overview

This application allows you to create a CHM-like help file (including an "Index" and a "Search" tab) by simply creating variables that hold Markdown text defining a help page. This makes you completely independent from any 3rd-party tools for creating and maintaining help files.

It has the benefit of allowing you to edit your help pages while developing or tracing your application.

Note that the now outdated project APLTreeHelp offered exactly the same functionality. The difference is that in APLTreeHelp help pages were represented by dynamic functions returning a vector of vectors with tags and text. Markdown has significant advantages when it comes to editing a help page. That's why APLTreeHelp was replaced by Markdown2Help.

This is what Markdown2Help's own help page looks like:

To give it a try just download Markdown2Help, unzip it, load it into a Dyalog session and call this function:

      #.Markdown2Help.Selfie 1

If you want to investigate Markdown2Help's own help pages look into #.Markdown2Help.HelpHelp with the Workspace Explorer:

Note how the namespaces reflect nodes and the variables reflect help topics.

This is what a typical help variable looks like:

How to start

Since version version 2.2.0 there is a method CreateStub available that makes it easy to start a new help system.

Just call it and provide a proper name as the right argument. If it's not supposed to live in # you can specify the name of the namespace it shall be created in as the left argument.

It will then create a couple of pages and a node and finally display it.

Requirements

Markdown2Help needs at least version 14.0.

Project Page

For bug reports, future enhancements and a full version history see Markdown2Help/ProjectPage

Version Information

CategoryAplTree