Software Help
From TM Wiki
This tutorial explain how to use TM-Wiki to create help files and documentation for your TM softwares
Contents |
Writing the article
Title
To facilitate searching help for your software, it's important to ahve a very simple and small title. Here's what we recommend :
<your software>:Help
Content
It's recommended to organize your article by feature and/or dialog box. We'll see later it's possible to create contextual help from your application to a specific paragraph.
Further more, screenshots aren't too useful because the user will have your suftware on his desktop when he reads the help.
Wiki
Don't forget that the Wiki is a community website. Ths most important is to create the article structure, not it's contents. Take care to create an help chapter for each feature, even if it's content is empty for a start. Maybe other community members will add some content to your help article.
Secondary help
It's possible to write more than one help article, even if it's better to regroup everything in only one topic. But if its content is too long or too complexe then it's better to split into sub articles.
In that case, title should stay simple as in these examples.
<your software>:Support <your software>:Skin
take care to register the sub-articles into you main help article to facilitate navigation.
Category
TrackMania tools help articles should be set in other tutorials, even if the article on the software itseft will be set in Tools.
Please check articles are in the correct category.
Software integration
Anchored links to the article
To access a paragraph directly, you have to set anchors into the article. Wiki automatically sets anchors in chapter name, but is better to set them manually on each subject which will be accessed directly.
To add an anchor on a chapter, write this :
=== <span id="Anchor1">Feature 1</span> ===
Achor can be access from the article using
[[#Anchor1]]
Or from another article using
[[<your software>:Help#Anchor1]]
Accessing articles from the software
After placing anchors into you article, you can access it using the URL :
http://en.tm-wiki.org/wiki/<your software>:Help
or directly to an achnor
http://en.tm-wiki.org/wiki/<your software>:Help#Anchor1
The anchor purpose is obvious : you can create a contextual help from each of your dialog boxes in the software you created.
To do that, the simpliest way is to call the Window Shell runing the URL. Protocole association in the registry will make the default browser to start on the targeted webpage. Your help file will be displayed then.
Other languages
If you want to use help files by language, be sure so keep thes recommendations in mind :
- Use the same article structure.
- If you translated chapter titles, don't translate anchors.
- Take care to link all helpfiles together.
