Question about user documentation (B&S)

[Jason Fritz]

Hi,

I would like to know your point of view regarding the user documentation.

As told in the assigment, user documentation must be provided. The question is that if it's worth to use JavaHelp system to provide online user documentation or just keep it very simple and use (as suggested) a plain html file.

By now I'm biased to the second option

Cheers

[Jeroen T Wenting]

Unless JavaHelp is part of the standard libraries (as shipped with the compiler) (which AFAIK it isn't) you're not allowed to use it.

[Jared Cope]

Hi,

Jeroen is right. The JavaHelp is a separate download and will not be included in the standard JRE that you will be marked with -- hence your application will fail when run.

If you are keen to provide online help, have you thought about using a JEditorPane and setting the content type to html? I am toying with this idea at the moment. This would allow you to write HTML help and easily incorporate it into the application.

Just an idea.

Cheers, Jared.

[Jeroen T Wenting]

That's what I did. Apart from the rather primitive html support (3.0 partial) it works well.

[Jason Fritz]

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts.

Yes, what I've done is to use a JEditorPane to view an html document, however I have had some problems when packaging the help html files in the runme.jar file (an exception occurs stating that the class was unable to find one of the help files, no idea why...) that's why I was considreing the use of JavaHelp.

But I think you're right so I'll keep my JEditorPane as a help viewer.