Couple of extra points: forgot about the \i\cw special case, and
[sgt/halibut] / doc / running.but
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11f2edfa 1\C{running} Running Halibut
2
3Running Halibut is very simple. You provide a set of input files on
4its command line, and it produces a set of output files.
5
6\c $ halibut intro.but getting-started.but reference.but index.but
7\e bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
8
9This will generate a large set of output files:
10
11\b \c{output.txt} will be a plain ASCII text version of the input
12document.
13
14\b \c{output.hlp} and \c{output.cnt} will be a Windows Help version
15of the same thing. (Most of the text is in \c{output.hlp};
16\c{output.cnt} contains additional contents data used by the Windows
17help topic selector. If you lose the latter, the former should still
18be usable, but it will look less modern.)
19
20\lcont{
21Note that Halibut does not require any external software such as a
22Help compiler. It \e{directly} generates Windows Help files, and
23therefore it doesn't need to be run on Windows to do so: it can
24generate them even when run from an automated script on a Unix
25machine.
26}
27
28\b \c{output.1} will be a Unix man page.
29
30\b The set of files \c{*.html} will contain an HTML version of the
31document. If you have configured Halibut to generate more than one
32HTML file (the default), then the file \c{Contents.html} will be the
33topmost one that users should be directed to initially. If you have
34configured Halibut to generate a single file, it will be called
35\c{Manual.html}.
36
37Unfortunately, in the current version, it is not possible to
38tell Halibut to generate these files under different names; so you
39will need to rename them manually after they are generated. (Even
40this won't work for the multiple-file HTML document, because there
41will be lots of internal hyperlinks between the various files which
42use their names.) Neither is it possible to tell Halibut not to
43bother generating some of the output formats, so you will need to
44delete any that you don't want.
45
46I regret this inconvenience; it arose because I was more interested
47in getting the difficult document-formatting code to work than I was
48in sorting out details like this which should be easy. At some point
49I plan to add some command-line options to configure all this.