Help manual revised

[RNBW]

Hi Richard
You refer to CHM and PDF versions of the BBC BASIC SDL2 Help Manual. All I can find is the manual produced online.
I like to work with offline documentation. Is there a CHM or PDF version available. If so, could you advise how I can obtain them.
I would be most grateful.
By the way, a belated Happy New Year!

[Richard Russell]

Is there a CHM or PDF version available. If so, could you advise how I can obtain them.

The references to CHM and PDF versions of the manual apply to BBC BASIC for Windows only, sorry. CHM is effectively a Windows-only format and, as discussed earlier, there isn't (as far as I know) a cross-platform reader that I could use to provide a similar facility in BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0. An AI query suggested eWriter but when I looked into it there was no reader available for Linux.

The PDF version of the manual is generated from the CHM version using the CHM to PDF Pro tool, hence the absence of a PDF version for BBCSDL too. You are not alone in wishing for an offline version of the BBCSDL manual, and if you or anybody else can suggest a way that could be produced without manual re-formatting I would be very interested.

When BBC BASIC for Windows was released, 25 years ago this year, 24/7 internet access was a luxury very few people had, so an offline manual was essential. That's very different now - the idea of not being connected to the internet is quite scary! - so I am less concerned about there not being an offline version of the BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 manual. But it would be nice to have.

Of course the BB4W and BBCSDL manuals have a lot in common, so if for example you are mostly interested in the descriptions of the keywords, or the VDU codes, or the 'star' commands, you could refer to the offline versions of the BB4W manual even when using BBCSDL. But you would have to be careful not to get confused if straying into the sections which are different (e.g. libraries).

[Richard Russell]

You refer to CHM and PDF versions of the BBC BASIC SDL2 Help Manual. All I can find is the manual produced online.

I've created a CHM version of the BBCSDL manual which you can download from here. Unfortunately it suffers from some internal linking issues and you may get stuck trying to navigate from one topic to another. In particular don't click on the CONTENTS link at the bottom of the pages.

Of course the CHM file can only straightforwardly be used in Windows, the HTML Help Viewer is a built-in feature. There are apparently some third-party CHM viewers for other platforms, such as CHM Viewer Star for MacOS and xCHM for Linux, but I have no experience of these (CHM Viewer Star is said to have a convert-to-PDF feature which would be very useful if it works).

I'd be interested to learn of people's experiences if they try these products, or any others.

[jinx100]

I've localized the set of HTML Manual pages so they can be used offline. Probably a few link errors yet but it works okay. I just link to the index.html file and open any topic in a new browser tab. No way to post the file here (it's a 570KB .7z file). I can email it to you or try to remember how to store it on Google.

[Richard Russell]

I've localized the set of HTML Manual pages so they can be used offline. Probably a few link errors yet but it works okay.

That's effectively what the CHM is, but compressed into a single file by Microsoft's 'HTML Help Workshop'. You can open that directly in Windows, and I believe third-party CHM readers are available for MacOS and Linux, although I don't know how well they render this particular CHM.

Another advantage of the CHM over HTML is the alphabetical index, which is automatically generated.

[JeremyNicoll]

You refer to CHM and PDF versions of the BBC BASIC SDL2 Help Manual. All I can find is the manual produced online.

I've created a CHM version of the BBCSDL manual which you can download from here.

Will that get re-generated if/when you release updated versions of BBC SDL?

[JeremyNicoll]

Is there a CHM or PDF version available. If so, could you advise how I can obtain them.

The references to CHM and PDF versions of the manual apply to BBC BASIC for Windows only, sorry.

The PDF version of the manual is generated from the CHM version ...

I couldn't find the PDF manual for BB4W on the website - links to the "manual" only took me to the online / html manual.

I did a "site" search via Google, though, for 'PDF' and found

- the PDF manual at: https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/manual/bbcwin.pdf

- the PDF tutorial at: https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/tutorial/bbctutor.pdf

I think those links could usefully be added to the tops of the corresponding online/html pages (unless they way they're generated precludes it).
They could also both go into the list of links for BB4W on the "Products" page: https://www.bbcbasic.net/products.html
and/or https://www.bbcbasic.net/bbcwin/download.html

[Richard Russell]

Will that get re-generated if/when you release updated versions of BBC SDL?

No.

[Richard Russell]

The PDF version of the manual is generated from the CHM version using the CHM to PDF Pro tool

CHM to PDF Pro was the best conversion tool I found (bearing in mind that this was twenty years ago or so), and I think it was quite expensive, but one thing it lacks is the ability to preserve internal links. Possibly back then PDFs didn't support clickable links, or it was a relatively new feature.

That means the generated PDF is fine for giving to your local High Street copy shop to print and bind a paper version, but isn't much use for offline browsing of the Help manual because the hyperlinks from one section to another are far too valuable to manage without.

So the CHM is better than the PDF for that purpose, although it remains to be seen how well the PDF reader(s) for Linux and MacOS cope with its specific characteristics (it is larger than a typical CHM, and has a more complex directory structure).

I would very much like to receive feedback from those running BBCSDL on platforms other than Windows.