Providing a Help Menu

The CDE Style Guide and Certification Checklist recommends that each menu bar include a Help menu. The Help menu may contain a variety of commands that let the user access different types of online help for your application.

The most important commands include:

• Introduction displays the home topic of your application's help, allowing the user to use hyperlinks to navigate to any desired information.

• Using Help displays help on help. This is information that tells the user how to use the Help System.

• Version displays your application's version and copyright information. The copyright topic (created using the <copyright> element) has the ID _copyright.

  Additional commands may display help on special keyboard usage, application tasks, reference, or tutorials. You should design your Help menu to best suit your application, while staying within the guidelines and recommendations of the CDE Style Guide and Certification Checklist.

See Also

• "To Create a Home Topic" describes how authors create the home topic for a help volume.

• "To Create a Meta Information Section" describes how authors create a copyright topic.

• Chapter 12, Providing Help on Help describes how help on help is found and how to add it to your application.