On May 19, 2008, at 10:44 AM, John Grimsley wrote:

> Here's an easy one for Monday.

This is a broad topic with many potential solutions, so answers ( or  
at least meaningful answers ) are far from easy.


> In modern 2000's programming, where do I start?  "%resPTR"?

That depends a lot on what you are willing to do and your application  
requirements. Here are two general approaches that will work. There  
might be others but these seem the most obvious:

(1) Apple Help (  FBtoC help is an example ) is considered the  
standard for help in OS X applications. This essentially means  
creating html files from your current text files. The calls to Apple  
help are trivial and have been demonstrated in several demos starting  
with Bernie's a few years ago. Many of us can show you the way with  
the program calls when you're ready. However, the bulk of the work  
( approximately 95% ) is preparing the html files.

(2) Implementing a scrolling text view would mimic the window, edit  
field with the vertical scroll bar shown in the post and can be  
implemented programmatically or with a nib. The text could be loaded  
into the window from files within the bundle

Personally, I prefer option #1 because the html files can be served  
elsewhere ( for example, notice the user can look at all the help for  
FBtoC directly from the FBtoC web page without downloading the  
application ).


Brian S.