IPFC.EXE
from the Developer's
Toolkit. See "Preparations" for where to get this utility.
MAKE.CMD
file on the top level of the XWorkplace source
files to have the doc files created. This might take a while. You will
first need to set a few environment variables on top of MAKE.CMD
, which
is documented in that file itself.
You then have two alternatives for the translations:
.HTML
files and
keep using MAKE.CMD
to have the HTML files converted into a single .IPF file
(using the HTML2IPF utility), which can then be fed into IPFC.EXE
.
This has the advantage that you'll only have to change some panels in future versions, of which I will keep track. Also, I always note changes to the INF and HLP files in the HTML source files in HTML comments tags, so you can easily search for what's changed.
The disadvantage is that, being a REXX program, HTML2IPF is slow.
.IPF
file in each of the INF and
HELP directories directly, if you're familiar with the IPF source
language, which is a proprietary IBM format (and which I don't like
at all).
To do this, you'll have to create the two IPF source files first, using
MAKE.CMD
. You can then translate this file and
feed it into the IPFC.EXE
compiler
to have the .INF and .HLP files created.
This has the disadvantage that if certain panels change in future versions, you'll have no clue what parts changed in this single IPF file, because the comments about changes are only visible in the HTML sources.
If you still want to use this method, please change the text only. Do not change any resources, IPF tags, and especially not the resource ID's, or XWorkplace will not find its help panels any more.
XFLDRxxx.HTML
, respectively, with "xxx" being your
country code (which you should change in this one filename because HTML2IPF will use this
name for the target IPF file also).
To use HTML2IPF manually (instead of through MAKE.CMD
),
open a command line in the INF or HLP
directory (with XWorkplace ;-)
), and type:
<path>\html2ipf xfldr001.html
This will create a XFLDRxxx.IPF
file (in the above example,
XFLDR001.IPF). You can then run ipfc XFLDRxxx.IPF
to compile
a HLP file; add an /INF
switch to produce an "INF" file.
You must have the INF or HLP directory as your current directory,
or HTML2IPF will tumble.
In any case, mind these important notes:
XFLDRxxx.HTML
is the "root" file.
Files beginning with "0" appear in the contents tree of the
produced INF and HLP files.
All other files are somwhere below in the INF/HLP table-of-contents
hierarchy, depending on the SUBLINKS
tags in the HTML source files.
Also, if you change the linkage of the HTML files, the resource IDs of the help panels will be altered, and XWorkplace will then get confused displaying the proper help panels.
;-)