Apple Help Book tutorial

Question

Can somebody point me to an up to date tutorial on how to create a help book for Cocoa application. Everything I've found online is old and outdated and the Apple documentation doesn't make it any clearer. One specific thing I can't figure out is how to create a .help bundle.

Answer 1

After asking this question I went to the bookstore and got this book. It has a very good step by step tutorial on how to create the help book. It has answered all my questions.

http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321670418

Answer 2

This document contains information on the help bundle layout (and Apple Help in general):

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/authoring_help/authoring_help_book.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000903-CH206-TPXREF104

On the other hand, the help bundle format has never really been required (and in some OS versions was not officially supported despite Apple using it themselves for years).

All I do is set CFBundleHelpBookFolder and CFBundleHelpBookName (in Info.plist). The latter is a human-readable title, e.g. "YourApp Help", that must match the AppleTitle in the HTML.

I set CFBundleHelpBookFolder to simply the name "Help" and I create the folder Something.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Help in the application bundle. In this directory I place index.html (containing the required <meta> tags AppleTitle and AppleIcon) and ExactMatch.plist. (By the way, it is actually a good idea if everything else goes into a subfolder below this point so that the help system doesn't have to search many top-level files.)