Simplify treatment of the copyright notice, now I've also simplified
[sgt/halibut] / doc / running.but
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11f2edfa 1\C{running} Running Halibut
2
339cbe09 3\I{running Halibut}Running Halibut is very simple. You provide a set
4of input files on its \i{command line}, and it produces a set of
5output files.
11f2edfa 6
7\c $ halibut intro.but getting-started.but reference.but index.but
8\e bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
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339cbe09 10This will generate a large set of \i{output files}:
11f2edfa 11
339cbe09 12\b \i\c{output.txt} will be a \i{plain text} version of the input
11f2edfa 13document.
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339cbe09 15\b \i\c{output.hlp} and \i\c{output.cnt} will be a \i{Windows Help}
16version of the same thing. (Most of the text is in \c{output.hlp};
11f2edfa 17\c{output.cnt} contains additional contents data used by the Windows
18help topic selector. If you lose the latter, the former should still
19be usable, but it will look less modern.)
20
21\lcont{
22Note that Halibut does not require any external software such as a
339cbe09 23\i{Help compiler}. It \e{directly} generates Windows Help files, and
11f2edfa 24therefore it doesn't need to be run on Windows to do so: it can
25generate them even when run from an automated script on a Unix
26machine.
27}
28
339cbe09 29\b \c{output.1} will be a Unix \i{\cw{man} page}.
11f2edfa 30
339cbe09 31\b The set of files \c{*.html} will contain an \i{HTML} version of
32the document. If you have configured Halibut to generate more than
33one HTML file (the default), then the file \c{Contents.html} will be
34the topmost one that users should be directed to initially. If you
35have configured Halibut to generate a single file, it will be called
11f2edfa 36\c{Manual.html}.
37
339cbe09 38Unfortunately, in the current version, it is not possible to tell
39Halibut to generate these files under different names; so you will
40need to \I{renaming files}rename them manually after they are
41generated. (Even this won't work for the multiple-file HTML
42document, because there will be lots of internal hyperlinks between
43the various files which use their names.) Neither is it possible to
44tell Halibut not to bother generating some of the output formats, so
45you will need to delete any that you don't want.
11f2edfa 46
47I regret this inconvenience; it arose because I was more interested
48in getting the difficult document-formatting code to work than I was
49in sorting out details like this which should be easy. At some point
50I plan to add some command-line options to configure all this.