Subject: using Index.html as Help file

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 09:21:43 -0400

We certainly can't fault Jan for not replying quickly to our questions!  I only
wish commercial support was that fast to respond...

Awhile back I said that the INDEX.HTML file in the Swi-Prolog manual was empty. 
Jan suggested that there might be a case conflict (on Windows systems).  He was
right; a Windows program I have shows both an index.html and an Index.html, and
since Windows has case-insensitive filenames, the one had clobbered the other.

In order to make the Index.html file function as a help file, I munged it in an
editor by adding a name=<pred name> to all the <A...> tags that contained Prolog
predicates or C function calls to Prolog.  Then an HTML browser can be called
with the predicate's name at the end of the URL, e.g.
    file:///c:\foobar\Index.html#recorda
(Note the lack of the arity indication.)  I did the same for the PL_<name>
function calls.  I wonder if this "name=<pred name>" structure couldn't be
automatically generated in the HTML file?

I then set up the VSlick editor so that typing @H with the cursor in a Prolog
built-in pred name automatically calls up the index file and scrolls it to show
the first index entry for that name.  (Since there may be several preds with the
same name but different arities, I didn't try to go directly to the appropriate
sxn of the manual.  I'm not quite up to determining the arity of the pred in
VSlick.  For that matter, I don't know how to make my browser automagically jump
the additional link.)

If anyone else is using the VSlick editor, I'll be glad to provide them with
this index file and several other things I did to make VSlick work better with
Swi-Prolog (the chief of which was making VSlick jump to the appropriate line in
a file, based on the compiler's error msgs).

                            Mike Maxwell
                            [email-masked]
                            Summer Institute of Linguistics