Help file for app... using a PDF?

B

btoth

Person that uses a Mac
Well, I made a really nice PDF document as a manual for my new program. However, the basic help system in Cocoa seems to just support HTML files for Apple's Help Viewer. Now, what I did was run as NSTask for the "open" command pointed to the help document in my app's main bundle.

Is this acceptable? It does exactly what I wanted it to do. But is this method discouraged for any reason?
 
well, as personal opinion here...since it doesn't open in help viewer this method comes off to be as being a bit ghetto. But if it works then hey, that's good. I would consider using the help viewer to have your app look more normal/professional. Also, I think help viewer may have a better way to search via the "Ask a question" way of searching, I could be wrong. If your app runs on 10.2 machines and your users don't have adobe acrobat reader installed then, with the old preview, they can't even search at all!

Again, this is my personal opinion.
 
Use one of NSWorkspace's methods for launching a file. This is how the open command is actually implemented.

Oh, and he's right. Avoid PDF unless you're trying to produce printables...
 
NSWorkspace is definitely cleaner than messing with NSTask for this, um, task. I do realize that to conform to the Apple guidelines I should be using the Apple Help system for my app's help documentation. However, I'm sticking with a PDF for this app.

Thanks for the help, sometimes it's hard to find something specific in the Cocoa documentation.
 
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