Liberty Basic Simple Help
by Tom Nally

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(** Special thanks to Alyce for LBSH interface assistance! **)

Liberty Basic Simple Help, or LBSH, is a way to provide Help files within your Liberty Basic applications. LBSH uses only native Liberty Basic Controls. By "native" controls, we mean the familiar controls that make up Liberty Basic, such as Buttons and ComboBoxes.

LBSH works by loading your help articles or documents into LBSH's TextEditor control. But your Help system will likely consist of many Help articles, and LBSH allows the user to pick the one he wants by selecting the article's title from a ComboBox located just above the TextEditor control.

Below the TextEditor control are two command buttons, labeled "Previous" and "Next". By pressing these buttons, your users can navigate through the various Help articles in sequence. As expected, the "Previous" button calls up the Help article previous to the one currently being read. The "Next" buttons calls up the Help article just after the one currently being read.

Two significant features of LBSH:

• The font selection, left margin, and wrap length are easily customizable. Word wrapping is done automatically by LBSH.
• The Help articles are merely text documents. Therefore, they can be written with any application that's capable of saving a file in text format.

There are two different ways to use LBSH in your own applications. The first way is to import the code of LBSH into the code of your application. This is done in three steps: (1) copy the initialization section to the top of your program; (2) copy the LBSH "engine" to whatever branch label is indicated by your Help command; and (3) copy the CharacterPosition() function to the end of your program, or wherever you keep your user-defined functions. These three sections are easily identified in the code of the LBSH application.

However, the second way to use LBSH appears to be much easier. At the branch label which starts your own Help system, merely place a command like this: RUN "LBSH.tkn". (Of course, you would need to use the actual name of your own Help tkn file.) The advantage of this is that it allows you to develop your LBSH system as a separate, standalone application. You no longer have to mix the code of LBSH with the code of your own application.

This is just a brief overview of Liberty Basic Simple Help. To read more about it, the zip archive contains a program which discusses LBSH in more depth. In fact, I used LBSH to provide the detailed information about LBSH!

If your Help system can do without hypertext and graphics, LBSH is a way for you to provide help for your users without having to learn Microsoft's HTML Help system.



Home

Two Years Ago in LBNews
Effective GUI Design
Alternative to Graphics Printing
Liberty Basic Simple Help
New LB Programming Contest
Debugging by Simulating Breakpoints
Multi-Coloured Text Input Boxes