Contextual Help on Mac?

This is less of a Xojo question and more of a general development question.

I’m building a cross-platform Xojo app and I’d like to create a searchable help file that also is contextual - As in when the user presses F1 it launches the help file and jumps to the relevant page for the window they were on.

On Windows, we have .CHM help files. Is there a Mac equivalent to this? How is it authored? Are there any cross-platform tools that can do both?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Apple does indeed have a help system, it’s HTML based.

To make it “context” sensitive, you have to tell it to display a specific anchor, so you’d change the anchor name in your help button.

A word of warning about the Apple help system, if it doesn’t work, it is incredibly unhelpful and with the first release of Monterey, many people couldn’t open help files for 3rd Party applications.

It really depends on how the Windows help system works, you may want to consider creating your own help viewer so you only maintain one set of code for integrating help into your application.

For App Wrapper and Sleep Aid, I’m using my own help viewer, because I’m tired with fighting Apple to display help.

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