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Help Source File Format

   A RHELP help file is compiled (or indexed) from a text-based source
   file with the RHELP compiler RHC.EXE.  Help text is delimited by help
   keyword Id markers.  When RHC finds a help Id marker, it records file
   location information which is stored in the resulting help file header
   for fast text retrieval.  RHC is not really a compiler but rather an
   indexer - it creates an index to help text which is stored at the
   beginning of the resulting help file.  RHC compiled help files have an
   extension of .HLP by default.

   RHC compiles help text files which have keyword and Id markers.
   Keywords are text strings which uniquely identify a block of help
   text.  Id markers are special characters that delimit keywords.  These
   keywords are stored in the help file header, and are the strings that
   are used to look up help text blocks via the RHELP API functions.

   Id markers are denoted by the special colon and vertical bar character
   sequence ":|" left justified in the first two line column positions.
   They may not be indented, if they are, the text will be treated as
   normal help text.  Immediately following the Id marker is the help
   keyword.  Keyword text may be any length but only the first 16
   characters are significant.  Case is not significant, keywords may be
   upper, lower, or mixed case.  All keywords are normalized to upper
   case at lookup time.  Id markers and keywords must appear on a single
   line together by themselves.  The actual help text begins on the next
   line.  The following is a sample excerpt from a RHELP help source
   file.

     +----------------------------------------------------------------+
    1|My applications help source file.  (this line will be ignored!) |
    2|:|MAIN MENU               This is an Id marker                  |
    3|                                                                |
    4|    This is help text associated with a main menu option        |
    5|                                                                |
    6|Press the directional arrow keys to navigate through the menu   |
    7|items, press ENTER to select a menu item, or ESCAPE to leave.   |
    8|                                                                |
    9|:|CUSTOMER EDIT SCREEN                                          |
   10|                                                                |
   11|Press the up and down arrow keys to move between edit fields.   |
   12|Enter data in all of the fields highlighted.  The fields are:   |
   13|                                                                |
   14|Name    - Enter the customer's full name, last name first.      |
   15|                                                                |
   16|Address - Enter the street address for the customer             |
   17+----------------------------------------------------------------+

   In the above example, line number one is ignored by RHC because it is
   not associated (comes after or under) an Id marker.  Line number two
   is an Id marker line because the two character sequence ":|" appears
   in the left column.  Only the first 16 characters of this Id marker
   (not including the Id marker ":|" itself) are saved as the help key.
   In this example the keyword is "MAIN MENU".  Any characters appearing
   on this line after the 16th character are ignored by RHC.  In this
   example the comment "This is an Id Marker" is ignored.  The next six
   lines are the help text associated with the help key MAIN MENU.  The
   next line (line #9) is another Id marker line.  The help key is saved
   as "CUSTOMER EDIT SC" since these are the first 16 characters.  The
   following seven lines are its associated help text.

   RHC will compile help files with a limit of 500 Id markers (keywords).
   Since RHC stores pointer information in arrays during the compile,
   making this limit larger consumes more memory.  To increase (or
   decrease) the number of keys allowed, just change the MAXKEYS variable
   (or #define in the 5.01 version) in the RHC.PRG source code and re-
   compile and re-link RHC.EXE.  You should note that the practical limit
   is about 1000 keys.  With MAXKEYS set to 1000 the runtime executable
   program requires about 512K of RAM to run.