Overview
The Help Browser provides the on line user documentation for JObserve
by allowing navigation amoung a set of html pages.
This browser can also serve as a rudimentary Web browser.
The Help Browser window contains three panels, a topic list, a
subtopic list and an html rendering window.
The user can select topics and subtopics to be displayed in the html
window.
Implementation
The Help browser is class
GUI.HelpBox.
The *.nav file
This display is driven by a root html directory (can be a jar file)
and a file (JObserve???.nav) which provides the information for the
topic and subtopic lists.
Entries in this file consists of pairs of lines, the first beginning
with $topic$ or $subtopic$ followed by the topic or subtopic label.
The second line of the pair is a relative or absolute URL.
Subtopics refer to the previous topic.
$topic$ First topic name
FirstTopic.html
$subtopic$ First Subtopic name
FirstTopic.html#FirstSubtopic
$subtopic$ Second Subtopic name
FirstTopic.html#SecondSubtopic
The help browser may be created and run independently or function
showHelp
used to set the current topoic and subtopic.
This latter function is not used at present (12/98).
Html rendering engine
The html browser in the ICEBrowser which NRAO has licenced from
ICEsoft AS from Gergen, Norway (http://www.icesoft.no).
It may be necessary to occasionally update this package.