MakeText Version 2.1

A Help File Conversion Utility

Copyright (c) 1990 J.P. Ritchey

Compuserve ID: 72537,2420


MakeText is a file conversion utility that takes as input a
Borland format help file, TURBO.HLP for instance, and creates
text files that are suitable for input to the Turbo Power
Software MAKEHELP utility.

MakeText will convert the following Borland Help Files:

Turbo Pascal 4.0
Turbo Pascal 5.0
Turbo Pascal 5.5
Quattro Pro 1.0

MakeText should be able to convert the Turbo C ver. 2.0
help file. I don't own TC2.0, so I haven't been able to
verify this.

Version 2.0 incorporates changes that enable MakeText to
decompile the Quattro Pro help file (QUATTRO.HLP). There has also
been the addition of some command line switches to modify the
manner in which the output files are created.



The syntax of the MakeText Program is:

MAKETEXT [options] []

The following options are supported:

/Txxxx - Change starting Topic Number to xxxx. This
option will override the default starting topic number
of 1.

/S - Generate all output to a single file. All of the
help text will be written to a file with a "TXT" extension.
No include files will be generated.

/Wxx - Override the calculated value for the !WIDTH
statement with "xx". If the value is less than the calculated
value, it's possible that the generated help screens will
not look as desired.

/N - Generate a "!NOINDEX" after each TOPIC. See below
for a further explanation.

As shown in the command line syntax, MakeText only requires one
parameter, which is the of name of the Borland Help file to be
converted. An optional second parameter is the path of the resulting
output file(s). If no second parameter is given, the output files
will be written to the current directory with the name of the input
help file. To differentiate between the specification of a directory
only and a directory and name, the entry of a directory only should end
with a backslash. This can best be shown with a few examples.

C:\>MAKETEXT /T1001 C:\TP\TURBO.HLP
Input File: C:\TP\TURBO.HLP
Output File: C:\TURBO.xxx

Include files will be written, with a starting Topic number of 1001.


C:\>MAKETEXT /S C:\TP\TURBO.HLP C:\TPRO\
Input File: C:\TP\TURBO.HLP
Output File: C:\TPRO\TURBO.xxx

All output will go to the file "C:\TPRO\TURBO.TXT"


C:\>MAKETEXT C:\TP\TURBO.HLP C:\TPRO <-- No Trailing Backslash
Input File: C:\TP\TURBO.HLP
Output File: C:\TPRO.xxx <-- Probably not what was desired

Due to the size of the help files to be converted, the output is
split into multiple files, each approximately 40K bytes long,
unless the /S option is used when executing MakeText. The
files created will have the extensions .001, .002, .003, etc.
Turbo Pascal 5.5 will create 10 such files (.001 through .010).
The final file created will have the extension .TXT. This file
contains a "!WIDTH" and "!NOWRAP" directive and "!INCLUDE"
directives for the files that have been created. A check is made
before each numbered file is opened to see if disk space is
available. Since each numbered file is split at a "!TOPIC"
boundary and a single file could exceed 40K, a check for 45K of
free disk is made. If that amount of free disk is unavailable,
MakeText will pause allowing disks to be changed (if the output
media is floppy disk) or aborting the program. You can instruct
the program to continue, but if in fact the output file exhausts
free disk the program will abort rather unceremoniously, possibly
leaving buffered text in memory and not flushed to disk.

The Borland help system allows for "topics" to have multiple
names, while a "topic" in the Turbo Power system can only have
one name. Since topic names are maintained in alphabetical order
in a Borland Help file, and the first name encountered is assigned to
the topic, it is likely that some topics will not have the
correct name. For instance the names CRT, BLACK, BLUE, etc. all
refer to the same topic. BLACK will become the topic name,
although CRT is probably more appropriate.

For those topics that have multiple names, pseudo-topics are
created by MakeText. These pseudo-topics are links to the
actual topic text. The text of the pseudo-topics is "See name>", where is the name selected as described
above.

When merging the text generated by MAKETEXT with an existing set
of help texts, the OPRO texts for instance, the resulting index
displayed can be rather large. If the /N command line is used, a
!NOINDEX will be generated after each !TOPIC. This will eliminate
the BI topics from the TPRO/OPRO index. In a Borland help file
there is usually one topic that is identified as the main index
page. In Turbo Pascal, it's the help screen that is viewed when F1 is
pressed from within the help system. That topic will be indexed
regardless of the use of the /N switch and be given the topic name of the
help file itself. In the case of Turbo Pascal, it would be
"Turbo Pascal Help"

Any questions or comments can be addressed to me on Compuserve to
the PPN listed above via EasyPlex or at the following address:

J. Patrick Ritchey
100 Appleblossom Rd.
Pataskala, OH 43062