This section describes how you can prepare the on-line documentation for your simulator to be used in the SansGUI environment. Your on-line documentation within SansGUI is organized on a class-by-class basis; therefore, each class can have its own help file or a group of files with a designated starting file. The file location is specified in the class properties in the Schema Definition and is compiled into the Object Library. There are a few concerns when creating your on-line documentation: 1) Document Types, 2) SansGUI Document Locations, and 3) Class Document Locations.
What document types are supported by SansGUI? As a matter of fact, SansGUI does not limit the types of document but uses the file extension and type resolution mechanism in the Windows environment. In other words, as long as the file extension is registered in your user's Windows environment and there is a proper viewer program that can open those types of files, SansGUI will invoke the program to display the files. For example, a commonly used portable document type is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). If your documentation is written in HTML and the names of the files have either .htm or .html extensions, the registered browser will be invoked to display the files. If you use Adobe Acrobat (tm) to generate PDF files, the user will be required to download and install the Acrobat Reader to view the file. If you are sure that all your users have access to a viewer that can display a certain CAD format, then you can prepare your document files with CAD drawings in that format. Your on-line help files are displayed when the user clicks on the large icon button in the Properties dialogs associated with the classes, objects, parts, or links in your simulator. Because of the versatility of SansGUI, no special help authoring tools are required.
By default, the on-line help files are stored in the doc subdirectory under the SansGUI installation directory. The user, however, can change it by defining an environmental variable called SGUI_DOC for a customized document location. Because the user may have multiple simulators installed in the SansGUI environment, it is recommended that you put all your help files in a unique subdirectory under the doc subdirectory. Please notice that there is already a SansGUI subdirectory created under doc for some of the on-line documentation of SansGUI. When the user defines a new location by defining SGUI_DOC, the contents of the whole doc subdirectory should be moved to that new location.
We recommend that you create a document file for each class, so that your user can display it on-line as needed. The document file is specified via the Class Properties dialog in the Schema Definition. Because of possible name collisions with other installed simulators, we recommend that you put all the document files in a subdirectory under doc with a unique name. The name is entered with a relative file path in the following manner:
<SimulatorDocSubdirectory>/<ClassName>.<Extension>
A couple examples are:
MySim/Base_House.htm: to specify an HTML based help file for the class House derived from the Base class in the simulator called MySim.
MySim/Matrix_Profile.pdf: to specify a help file in the portable document format (PDF) for a matrix class called Profile in simulator MySim.
We use forward slashes in the file path for future portability to UNIX(tm) operating system environments.
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SansGUI Modeling and Simulation Environment Version 1.2
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