Text Directives

User Access Utilities › Help Text › Writing Help Text › Text Directives

Text Directives

Toolkit also introduces a number of extra control characters (directives) to provide additional functions. All Toolkit control characters begin with ‘.*’: this means they do not appear when help text is printed.

The following table includes Toolkit text control characters executed by YDSPHLP

Toolkit FACILITY	Character	Notes
Title line	. *T: ‘text’	Text appears as title line on Help text display
Display comment	. Y: ‘text’	Text appears on display, but not in printed document.
Vector table entry	. *YV: data LBL	Not displayed, but used to control which part of the text is displayed. LBL points to a ‘Label entry’ line: it can be up to 10 characters long.
Index entry	*YI: LBL ‘text’	Text appears as entry in Help display index. LBL points to a ‘Label entry’ line: it can be up to 10 characters long.
Label entry	. *YH: LBL	LBL corresponds to an ‘Index entry’ line, or to a ‘Vector table entry’ line.

In each case the directive must begin in column one with a ‘.’ (full stop) followed by the directive name *T: in columns 2-4 or *Y*:, *YV:, *YI: or *YH: in columns 2-5 . The directive name, labels, and so on, may be entered in upper or lower case (‘abc’ and ‘ABC’ are equivalent).