SEARCH ENGINE

The greatest advantage of online documents over paper documents is that you have tremendours search capabilitites. HTMLHELP provides an easy to use yet powerful way  to search your HTML documents. What HTMLHELP does is that is scans all HTML files belonging to the entire book and stores each word it finds in a database. This process is only needed once or at least when HTML pages have changed.

After the database has been build up you can quickly find any word or word combination in all your HTML files.

Building the index database

When you first start HTMLHELP with a new bunch of pages making up e.g. an online documentation for a new program you will notice that a window appears and asks you for some patience. After that another window shows you the progress of the indexing process. You will notice that each page actually each HTML file is being scanned and this will take its time. After indexing is complete a search statistic shows you how many different words had been indexed in how many pages.

Whenever you need to, you can re-index you database by pressing the refresh button from the search window.

Searching the index database

When an index database has been created pressing the search button will bring up a search window like that one shown below.

  1. Enter one ore more keywords you are looking for separated by spaces
  2. Decide if you want to find pages containing at least one of your keywords or you want to find just pages containing all of the keywords entered which generally leads to fewer hits.
  3. View the list of pages found meeting your conditions. Mark the page title you want to view.
  4. Press the display button to view the selected page. You will return to the viewing window
  5. Whenever you want to rebuild the keyword index press the refresh button. This could be advisable if you suspect the index database being damaged or some of the HTML pages have been changed.