OmniHelp display

OmniHelp displays Help in a tri-pane window, using frames. The top navigation pane presents the usual buttons: Start, Prev, Next, Back, Fwd, and Hide/Show. These buttons do what you would expect. Hide/Show controls the display of the left navigation pane.

Four navigation features list topic titles as links

The left navigation pane displays tabbed Contents, Index, Search, and Related:

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Contents

Displays the TOC, linked to HTML topic files, with expanding topic groups. For Nav 4 only, it shows the full TOC or one of two shorter versions that show only entries around the currently displayed topic.

Index

Presents an array of letters; displays expanding index entries for the selected letter, each entry followed by titles of the referenced topics, as links.

Search

Permits entry of a single search term, or a series of terms separated by Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT. The search result is a list of topic titles, as links. Search can also list all pre-indexed search terms, and show the number of topics each term references.

Related

Based on ALinks, or Subject markers, this feature displays as links the titles of topics you might expect to see when you click a “Related Topics” button in other systems.

OmniHelp integrates these four features to provide a common, consistent way of using each. In all four, the navigation pane contains a list of topic titles that are linked to the topics they identify. There are no buttons to look for, and no additional dialogs to work through.

Use current or new browser window

You can view OmniHelp two ways:

In the current browser window, whatever its size may be.

In a separate window of settable size, with most of the browser “chrome” removed, leaving a simple menu and status-bar frame. At present, this works in Internet Explorer and Opera, but not in Firefox or other Mozilla-derived browsers.