Listing Documents in the Help Menu
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## Listing Documents in the Help Menu

### Developer Information

This section is for developers. Documentation authors generally do not need to know this material.

Typically the application manual and possibly additional help documents will be made available to the user under the Help menu at the top right of the application. To do this, you must first write a `topic.dat` file. The format for this file is:

    One line for each 'topic'.

    Two columns, as defined by perl -e 'split(/\s+/,$aline,2)'

    First column is the HTML file (and optional section) for the topic,
    relative to the app's help file dir.

    Second column is the user-visible topic name.

For example, Gnumeric's `topic.dat` file is:

    gnumeric.html   Gnumeric manual
    function-reference.html Gnumeric function reference

When the application is installed, the `topic.dat` file should be placed in the `$prefix/share/gnome/help/`appname`/C/` directory where `appname` is replaced by the application's name. The application documentation (converted from SGML into HTML with db2html) should be placed in this directory too.

### Note

If the help files are not present in the correct directory, the menu items will NOT appear when the program is run.

The `topic.dat` file is used by the GNOME menu building code to generate the Help menu. When you define your menu:

    GnomeUIInfo helpmenu[] = {
                  {GNOME_APP_UI_ITEM,
                   N_("About"), N_("Info about this program"),
                   about_cb, NULL, NULL,
                   GNOME_APP_PIXMAP_STOCK, GNOME_STOCK_MENU_ABOUT,
                   0, 0, NULL},
                   GNOMEUIINFO_SEPARATOR,
                   GNOMEUIINFO_HELP("appname"),
                   GNOMEUIINFO_END
            };

the line specifying `GNOMEUIINFO_HELP` causes GNOME to create a menu entry which is tied to the documentation in the directory mentioned above. Also, all the topics in the `topic.dat` file will get menu entries in the Help menu. When the user selects any of these topics from the Help menu, a help browser will be started with the associated HTML documentation.

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