Creating Help for your functions

You can create HTML-based help for your functions that will appear any time a user presses the [F1] key when selecting the name of your new functions, just as with any built-in Mathcad function. Your Help files should be considered as a Web site, containing either a single HTML page or a series of linked pages. Mathcad online Help uses RoboHelp to create frames and a collapsible/expandable table of contents, but any basic HTML page will do.

In order to specify the location of the Help site for your functions, add the following lines to the file USER_EN.XML, located in the \DOC\FUNCDOC subdirectory of your Mathcad install directory:

<help_file>help_%s\user\userHelp.htm
<!-- Insert the name of your custom help file here -->
</help_file>

Where user is a directory in your \DOC\Help_EN (or \DOC\Help_DE, etc.) directory, and contains the main Help file userHelp.htm. There is a sample of this file shipped with Mathcad.

Then, in the description of each function, fill in the following tags, if desired:

<help_topic>
target in the help file you want to link to
</help_topic>

These tags are writing hashes and targets after the main Help file name. Your main page, as specified in the <help_file> tag, might have navigation to each function's page, or it could be one long file with <a name="target"></a> tags to specify a scroll-point in the file. To see exactly what URL is being passed to the Resources Window when you press [F1] on a function name, choose View > Address Bar from the window's menus.

Note that you could use Javascript to write an HTML frameset file that would parse hashes (#), which would allow you to link to individual help pages for different functions. Anything you can do in a client-side scripted Web site you can do with the Mathcad Resources window.

Notes:

The EN in the .xml file name indicates the English language interface. If you need to provide function definitions for other localized versions of Mathcad, use the appropriate files and folders: