Application Tutorials

For any application, the developer or developers may supply a tutorial, which is effectively another Presentation Manager program which provides step-by-step guidance to the user. IPF enables tutorials to be started from within help windows, in a number of ways:

  • Within a help panel, a hypertext or hypergraphic link may be defined with reftype=launch, and with the objectname= attribute specifying the name of the tutorial program. When the user selects the hypertext or hypergraphic item, the tutorial is started automatically.

  • A "Tutorial" item may be included in the "Help" pulldown menu in the application's main help window. This is done automatically by IPF if any help panel heading tag (:h1 through :h6) contains the tutorial attribute.

    In this case, the name of a tutorial program must be specified in the pszTutorialName parameter of the WinCreateHelpInstance() function call.

    When the user selects the "Tutorial" item from the "Help" pulldown menu, an HM_TUTORIAL message is sent to the active application window, with the first parameter containing the name of the tutorial program. The application typically processes this message by calling the DosExecPgm() function to start the tutorial program.

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