Inside Macintosh: Apple Guide Complete / Part - Appendixes

Appendix D - Checklist

Additional Guide File Tasks

After you complete your guide file, at some point you will want to modify its contents; you do this using a mixin. Apple recommends that you also localize your guide file for other regions. In addition to making your guide file available from your application's Help menu, you can integrate help into your application. These three guide file tasks are listed next.

• Localize your guide file
  • Extract language-specific text strings from your source files using Guide Maker's Localize utility (see page 7-3)
  • Translate the text strings using various tools (see page 7-6)
  • Merge the translated text strings back into your source files using Guide Maker's Localize utility (see page 7-5)
  • Localize any other elements of your guide file, such as pictures, as necessary (see page 7-5)
  • Compile your translated source files into a new guide file (see page 5-5)

• Modify a guide file by creating a mixin source file (see page 2-26)
  • Specify that the guide file is a mixin (see page 10-19)
  • Indicate whether it can be mixed in with any guide or only a specific guide (see page 10-20)
  • Specify additions and modifications to the main guide file's content (see page 10-190)
  • Compile your mixin source files into a Mixin guide file (see page 5-5)
  • Save your Mixin guide file (see page 5-6)

• Integrate your guide file with your application

  Refer to Chapter 9 for a description of the complete set of functions that allow you to provide the user with context-sensitive help from within your application.