% ndialog helpfile format % Jessica L. Parsons orc@pell.ch.il.us Wed Jan 16 10:12:23 PST 2008
Help files are a severely restricted subset of html that contains the tags listed below. The html parser in ndialog does not understand style sheets, and will most likely roll over sobbing if confronted with XHTML, but simple web pages will most likely format correctly within ndialog.
The html parser that ndialog uses to handle helpfiles is currently not even slightly flexible. Any misplaced tag will lead to your rendered help document looking very bizarre. One things to look out for are to make certain that all
<P>and</P>tags are matched and don’t nest funnily.
=<HTML>=
You encase a helpfile with this and </HTML>
=<HEAD>=
Like a web page, header information, like META and TITLE, goes
in this section.
=<TITLE>=
The titlebar for the display window comes from this section.
=<Hx>=
Various types of headers. For the text helpfile driver, headers
H1 and H2 are boldface uppercase, H3 and H4 are boldface, and
the rest are simply as is.
=<BLOCKQUOTE>=
Indented 4 spaces, width 8 spaces narrower.
=<P>=
A paragraph. You can use ALIGN=LEFT, ALIGN=RIGHT, or ALIGN=CENTER
to line it up the way you want.
=<CENTER>=
A shortcut for <P ALIGN=CENTER>
=<A>=
The traditional navigation tag. The helpfile driver does
not understand the html: and ftp: protocols, just the file: one.
=<BR>=
put in a linebreak.
=<PRE>=
Do preformatted text.
=<DL>=
A html definition list, with items introduced with = and item
descriptions introduced with
=<HR>=
Horizontal rules. WIDTH= is supported, though only percentage
widths are supported.
=<B>, <I>, <TT>=
Set the font to bold, italic, or typewriter.