USING HELP

The Help facility employs two Dialogs, a HelpSelectionDialog and a HelpDialog.
The first contains a ScrolledList of subjects for a topic. Help is available on
the following topics:  Help, Datapoints, GUI, and Screens. Each topic, except
for Help on Help, fills the selection of the HelpSelectionDialog with its list
of subjects. Click on an entry in a HelpSelectionDialog to display Help
on that subject in a HelpDialog. Help on Help uses the HelpDialog only.

Both Dialogs are modeless. That means you can still interact with any Sun MTPScan
window when a Help Dialog is visible. MessageDialogs, on the other hand,
are modal. You must dismiss a MessageDialog before you can interact with
other Sun MTPScan windows. Each Dialog has a button at the bottom that pops it down.

ORGANIZATION OF HELP FILES

By default, the Help files live in a directory tree under $UNIKIX/help. This
directory holds three subdirectories, one for each topic (except Help on Help).
A topic subdirectory holds one Help file for each subject. The first time you
request Help on a particular topic, Sun MTPScan extracts the first line from each
subject file in the topic's directory to initialize the HelpSelectionDialog.


CUSTOMIZING HELP

A site may want to add site-specific Help files, modify the default files,
or even translate the files to another language.  In any case, we recommend you
first copy the entire Help tree to a different location. Make changes only
to the copy and keep the released Help files for reference. Use the KIXSCANHELP
environment variable to identify the alternative directory. When you set
KIXSCANHELP, Sun MTPScan looks only in that directory for Help. Note that while the
subject files may change (in content, name, or number), the topic subdirectories
cannot change in name or number. Sun MTPScan will not process any other subdirec-
tories.


IF ALL TOPICS ARE NOT AVAILABLE

When it cannot find portions of the Help directory tree, Sun MTPScan desensitizes
options in the Help PulldownMenu for what cannot be found. Help on Help is 
always available because it is hard-coded into Sun MTPScan. There are several
situations when a given topic may not be available: KIXSCANHELP may be set
incorrectly, permissions on a topic directory may prohibit access, or a topic
subdirectory may be absent or misnamed. Once you resolve the problem, bring
Sun MTPScan down then back up again to gain access to your repairs.

