User Access Utilities › Help Text › Introduction

Introduction

The Toolkit help text facilities enable you to provide interactive help text for all of your menus and application programs.

• You can specify an index for the help text.
• You can specify which part of the text is to be displayed for a given cursor location (contextual or cursor sensitive help text).
• You can condition the relevant part of a help topic to be displayed, based on the circumstances.

Using Toolkit you can create online help text in a fast, flexible, way using the command Start SEU (STRSEU) of the i OS Source Entry Utility or S/38 Edit Text command (QSYS38/EDTTXT) of IBM’s Text Management/38. Both utilities have full screen editors that allow you to lay out text as it is to appear ("What-you-see-is-what-you-get"), and to specify an index for the help text.

Help text for a program is stored as a text document. When the user presses Help, either while displaying a menu with the Toolkit Go to Menu program (YGO), or while using an interactive application program, the program is temporarily suspended, and a specified document is displayed as help text. True context- sensitive help text can easily be provided in your own application, such as the right words in the right place.

You can write help text as it is to appear. Several special facilities provide useful ‘short cuts’, such as numbering sections automatically, and imbedding standard paragraphs. Most of the print control facilities of ‘Text Management/38’, such as underlining, are implemented, so you can format readable help text.