Hi, this is a little modified copy of my mail to Jim.
Hi Jim,
you are right, FreeDOS supports several tags, see:
https://www.bootablecd.de/FreeDOS-Internet-version/help110/en/hhstndrd/authors/tags.htm
But please please keep away from doing this.
There are a lot of reasons for this:
a) The help has hundreds of files that have to be modified,
b) And this in 5 different languages (english, spanish, french, german, turkish)
c) When adding all these tags each files becomes bigger (ca. 8 KB/file now x ca. 350 files) - and it already has an enormous size,
x 5 languages. And you have to enter all these tags correct in each language
d) Each tag makes the htm file more complex. One mistake ("<" instead of "<" or a forgotten ">" or "<" in <pre> </pre> etc.) can end in a chaos.
Modern browsers often ignore this, but we talk about a DOS tool...
e) Htmlhelp.exe only allows 76 characters per line (there is a line on left and right side), so you always have to check that you
do not write ONE character too much. It will appear as a new line with only one or several characters. So you always have to
check and count when a hyperlink or a tag is inside. x 5 languages = will cause a chaos. See screenshot (Jim got it).
So if you use %percnt; instead of % you can write 76+8-1 = 83 characters in this line.
I do not want to blame my colleagues that make translation, they do a great job, but when I made the last translation coordination I had to make
changes, and that is superfluous work. Bad hyperlinks, overlong text, doublespace between sentences (overtaken by programmer), etc. etc.
See it from the translators side:
You have a free space between <pre> and </pre> - this is the place where you enter your translated text. This is simple. Each tag
that is not really needed makes it more complicated. You have to look for the correct translated word, you are in your language,
ehm, which tag do I have to enter before and after the word (as it is in the english text, not in yours, or you forget that this are two
different tags (start/end), so you copy the same tag twice, I know this is bad, but this shit often happened to me too).
f) Several really necessary tags did not work with the original version of htmlhelp, e.g. "&" or "<>". As these characters are necessary,
otherwise htmlhelp may misinterprete them I already added:
% = %
& = &
> = >
< = <
# = #
~ = ˜
in the htm files.
Next thing: Some characters, e.g.
«
»
'
etc. are not available in all countries. At least with Codepages. So they may look fine in english, but not in translation.
Hope you can understand why I think it is no good idea to add "superfluous" tags in a DOS tool although I have to admit
that it looks fine on modern systems.
Willi
From: "Jim Hall via Freedos-devel" <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
To: "Technical discussion and questions for FreeDOS developers." <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Cc: "Jim Hall" <jh...@freedos.org>
Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] Second call for htmlhelp
>
> I sent a separate email to Willi that included screenshots (the list
> doesn't like screenshots) but I wanted to repeat this thought with the
> list:
>
>
> >>
> BTW, I created my own index.htm file and ran a few tests. HTML Help
> supports HTML coding structures - this is awesome! I honestly don't
> remember if HTML Help supported that previously, so maybe this isn't
> new. But it makes me wonder: Do we need to use <pre> to format
> everything "manually"?
>
> I tried with tables, and tables don't work .. and that's okay, tables
> are hard in plain text. So I guess we'd need to use <pre> to format
> lists of links in columns. But I think most use cases could use
> standard HTML tags for headings, paragraphs, lists, bold, italics,
> links, .. I think using standard HTML would make the pages easier to
> maintain, and easier for others to contribute.
>
[..]
If anyone is curious, here is the test HTML file I used. If you render
this in a desktop browser like Firefox, the only difference is <ol>
will be a numbered list on Firefox (not on HTML Help):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>This is a test</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Here is the title</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.
I've added a lot of text to this paragraph so that it will wrap lines.
Some text in <i>italics</i>, <em>emphasis</em>, <b>bold</b>, and
<strong>strong</strong>.
Here is some <code>inline code</code>.
Here is some more text.</p>
<h2>Lists:</h2>
<p>This is a bullet list:</p>
<ul>
<li>item 1</li>
<li>item 2</li>
<li>item 3</li>
</ul>
<p>This is a numbered list:</p>
<ol>
<li>item 1</li>
<li>item 2</li>
<li>item 3</li>
</ol>
<h2>Sample code:</h2>
<p>This is a sample F77 program:</p>
<pre>
PROGRAMHELLO
PRINT*,5HHELLO
END
</pre>
<p>The end</p>
</body>
</html>
*Apologies for frightening anyone with the unexpected F77 code. :-P
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