Write Once, Read Many...with Hyperwise

by Cathy Longenberger

Did you know that Hyperwise outputs online help and books that are viewable on many kinds of operating systems? You can write once with Hyperwise, then export to INF, HLP, or HTML format, and then view the document on Windows 16- and 32-bit operating systems as well as AIX, Sun, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and the Internet.

This article provides details on the differences between platforms to give you an idea of the differences in how your online helps or books will look. You'll also find 'how-to' information if you are migrating applications from Windows.

Volume 9 of The Developer Connection for OS/2 includes Hyperwise Lite. It provides HPJ import, IPF import, and INF and HLP exports. The combination of these components lets you port your Windows help files, update the text, add links, and more, and then export as online help (.HLP) or book (.INF) format that can be viewed on OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Windows 95, AIX, Sun, and HP. (Note: Hyperwise Lite does not include HTML export, Tutor/2, or BookMaster import or export.)

IPF on Windows, AIX, Sun, and HP
In general, the differences on platforms are related to graphic formats, character graphics, and fonts. IPF for Windows, AIX, Sun, and HP are available in The Developer Connection for OS/2 section of the OS2DF2 forum on CompuServe.

The IPF readers on each platform handle conversion of graphic formats during run time, so that is rarely a problem.

Tables, though, are not as 'pretty' on other platforms as they might be on OS/2 or AIX because on these platforms tables are made up of box character graphics. However, on Windows 3.1, tables become plus and minus signs.

The code pages supported in each platform are not the same. For example, for US English and Western European languages, the different platforms support the following code pages: These differences result in some characters (such as the box characters) appearing in OS/2 and AIX but not in Windows, HP, or Sun. These code page differences also cause system fonts to be different between platforms.
 * OS/2 supports code pages 437 and 850.
 * AIX supports only 850 and ISO 8859-1.
 * HP supports both HP Roman 8 and ISO 8859-1.
 * Sun supports only ISO 8859-1.
 * Windows supports only Windows ANSI (subset of ISO 8859-1).

To avoid problems with cross-platform online help or books, we recommend that you stay away from tables. Instead, use Hyperwise's Example element to line up information in columns - that element works well across platforms. Also, stay away from any other kinds of character graphic elements. Finally, expect the system fonts to be different on different platforms.

For the help API on OS/2, you will find support for the help API that is used in Windows 3.1. To get maximum benefit from the cross-platform IPF readers, though, convert to the table/subtable scheme that OS/2 uses. Most samples of help tables show resource IDs (resid's) as numbers.

For more information on how to create the application interface to help, check the Hyperwise online documentation or the Developer's Toolkit for OS/2 Warp technical library (both are on your accompanying DevCon CD-ROMs).