Common Desktop Environment: Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide

Creating Meta Information Topics

The meta information section is primarily intended for information about information. Similar to providing a copyright page in a book, this section includes information such as the volume title, copyright, trademark, and other notices.

A secondary use of the meta information section is to enter help topics that are not part of the normal topic hierarchy. These nonhierarchical topics are useful for creating custom definition links that pop-up a topic in a quick help dialog box.

To Create a Meta Information Section

  1. Enter the <metainfo> tag to start the section, and enter the required subelements <title> and <copyright> as shown:

    <metainfo>
    
     <title> Volume Title Here
     
     <copyright>
     Body of copyright topic here.
     .
     .
     .
  2. Enter any of the optional elements as shown:

    <abstract>
     Body of the abstract topic here.
     Do not use any HelpTag markup within the abstract!
    
  3. Enter the <\metainfo> end tag to end the section.

    .
     .
     .
     <\metainfo>

    Note -

    Some elements in the meta information section require a <head> tag before the topic heading.


    The <abstract> section is recommended. Applications that access help volumes can use this information to present a brief description of the volume. Because the abstract might be displayed in plain text windows (that do not support multiple fonts and graphic formatting), avoid including any HelpTag markup in the abstract.

Example

Here's a typical meta information section:

<metainfo>
  <title>  Report Master, Version 1.0

   <copyright>
     <otherhead> Report Master

     <image>
     Version 1.0
     &copy; Copyright Reports Incorporated 1995
     All rights reserved.
     <\image>

   <abstract>
     This is the online help for the mythical Report Master
     application. This help includes a self-guided tutorial,
     a summary of common tasks, general concepts, and quick
     reference summaries.

 <\metainfo> 

The <image> element is used to preserve the author's line breaks. The &copy; entity inserts the copyright symbol.

See Also