StrongHelp 2.88 released

StrongHelp 2.88 is now available from my website.

Changes from 2.87

This version fixes a few more ARMv7 issues. Searching manuals is now fully functional again. Creating a new manual and copying files to it could abort under certain circumstances, this too has been fixed.

Deleting a large set of files (> 20) did not work correctly, some files were not deleted. The cause was how files were enumerated, it continued at the wrong point. The enumeration scheme has been changed to stop this from happening.

Re-ordered the items in iconbar menu so that they are in a more logical order (IMO). Added a ‘help…’ item to be style guide compliant and to make the manual is easier to find.

The *commands ‘StrongHelp’ and ‘StrongCreate’ have been renamed to ‘StrongHelp_Lookup’ and ‘StrongHelp_Create’ respectively to make the naming of *commands consistent. Aliases are set up for the old *commands so that programs that use them continue to work.

Created a new *command ‘StrongHelp_Install’ to allow manuals to be added to Temporaries, ready for lookups, without having to open the manual.

When saving a file to a manual, make sure the leafname doesn’t contain a dot otherwise you may end up with a page that can’t be opened later on.

A simple scroll request handler has been added so that long pages can be scrolled using the mouse wheel (on RISC OS 5).

Manual said that the Table page command would assume ‘Columns’ when no parameter was given but in fact it defaulted to ‘Lines’. Changed code to match the manual.

26-bit !Pre files

Although StrongHelp itself has been updated to run on modern CPUs, a number of manuals still contain a 26-bit !Pre file. !Pre files are used to assist with keyword lookups, eg by stripping the leading ‘X’ from SWI names.

A 26-bit !Pre file can cause an abort on modern CPUs depending on how tolerant it is of deprecated instructions. The ARMiniX seems to be okay with it but the RPi 3 definitely is not.

If you do get an abort when performing a lookup (Iconbar menu or F1 in StrongED / c-H in Zap) then it’s most likely down to a 26-bit !Pre file. You’ll need to find it and replace it with a 26/32-bit neutral version.

Included is an updated !Pre file for use in manuals that document SWIs. Please be sure to read the ReadMe in the Pre-files first.

Great to have this useful program kept up to date. Thank you, Fred.

One question: although StrongHelp has the useful Search function that lists pages on which a string occurs, I have never found a quick way to then find the string within the displayed page. If the displayed page is long or dense, it’s possible to use Edit page so as to use a text editor’s search, but couldn’t an open page within StrongHelp have input focus to accept a standard F4 to find string occurrences? Perhaps I have missed something obvious.

Thanks, and I recognise the problem as I too use ‘Edit page’ to find the actual occurrences. Opening a search box from a help page is probably easy, the hard part is how to highlight any matches found.

To be honest, I don’t know StrongHelp’s inner workings that well, I only took it on as there no longer was a maintainer and I’d already made StrongLib (the assembly library used by all 3 applications) ARMv7 compatible for StrongED and StrongMen. I’ll have a good look at this for v2.90 as I’d like to have something a bit more friendly too.

Why v2.90? Because v2.89 should be out soon to fix a couple of bugs found (with a big help from Sprow). One of them is quite serious and can lead to system instability if you run v2.88 and then quit it.