Re: help manager (continued)

[Bill St. Clair <bill>]

   From: cartier@mipsmath.math.uqam.ca (Guillaume Cartier)
   Subject: help manager (continued)
   To: info-macl@cambridge.apple.com (Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp)
   Date: Fri, 21 Jun 91 10:22:13 EDT
   X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL14]
   
   Related to the help manager question, I would think that
   if times permits the implementors of MCL will give us an
   event driven help system (I really hope so) based around
   CLOS.
   -- 
   Guillaume Cartier
   cartier@math.uqam.ca
   LACIM, Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

I've been working on this on and off for the last few weeks.  The
initial code was provided by Alan Ruttenberg.  I added help for menu
items and made it autoload.  It has two levels of interface.  The
simplest way to add help to a VIEW is to make it return a string as
the value of the HELP-STRING method.  You can put your strings in
resource files and communicate where they are with the HELP-SPEC
method, which supports 'STR ', 'STR#' resources (sorry, no PICTs yet).
HELP-SPEC for menus and menu-items supports the four different states
of the menu-item and takes care of consing up 'hmnu' resources on the
fly (unless you tell it not to).  Source code will be provided, and
the code will autoload when you "Show Balloons".