AMOS:Help file format

AMOSPro Helpfiles exist of a .map and .txt file.

The .map file

• the map file contains the list of all identifiers and length of the article
• the txt file contains all the articles in the same order as the list in the map file

The .txt file

• contains all articles without any way to seperate them
• the first line of each article is used as title in the AMOS help accessory

• links are format as
  • link to a file: {[Rarticle]label} -> example: {[RAMOSPro_Examples:Examples/H-3/Help_31.AMOS,0,4]Border}
  • link to an article: {[Iarticle]label} -> example: {[IHelpMC ,4,3] Machine code }

• incorrectly closed link tags with a missing } are shown correctly by the AMOShelp system
  (the AMCAF helpfile misses all } endtags)

General stuff

article identifiers

• case-insensitive (must be all uppercase in mapfile)
• can't contain spaces/Users/spellcoder/www/PROJECTS/AmigaCoding/articles.xml
• in the link you can however use spaces, ALL spaces will be ignored (at the beginning, end and middle)

Inner working of the AMOSPro_Help.AMOS accessory

• The viewer (AMOSPro_Help.AMOS) specs/limitations
  • 80 chars per line
  • fixed-width font

• The help texts (conventions)
  • the AMOS articles use extra spaces to get lines of the same length (justified alignment)
  • code is idented with 8 spaces

• articles are found by looking for the longest match in the .map file