Introduction to Apple Help

This document describes how Apple Help works and how you can use it. You should read this document if you are interested in using Apple Help to provide HTML-based user assistance in your Mac OS program.

Apple Help is an update and enhancement to previous versions of the Mac OS help system. It is available on Mac OS 8.5 and later, including Mac OS X. The Help Viewer, an HTML browser that provides the user interface for Apple Help, is described in "The Help Viewer". The Apple Help HTML extensions are described in "Apple Help HTML Enhancements". The Apple Help API is described in "Apple Help Reference" (page 1).

Note: This document refers to a complete set of help content as a help book; a set of files contained within a subfolder of the book is called a chapter, and an individual HTML file within a help book is called a page. For more information, see "Designing a Help Book".