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Creating help displays, Naming your help file, Adding subjects to existing help displays – Texas Instruments 4000M User Manual

Page 274

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Naming Your Help File

You can give your help display data file any name and ex-
tension you want—except

HELP.DAT

which is already in use

in the

UTILS

directory. For example, you could name your

Help display data file

MYFILE.HLP

. Then when you want to

load your Help display, at the

MS-DOS C

:\> prompt type

HELP MYFILE.HLP

and press ENTER.

If you type only

HELP

, without specifying a data file, the pro-

gram searches first for the default data file

HELP.DAT

in the

current directory; then it searches through all directories
specified in the

PATH

environment variable defined in your

AUTOEXEC.BAT

file. The program uses the same search tech-

nique if you type only a filename. If you type a filename pre-
ceded by a \ (backslash), which creates a pathname, the
program searches only for the file specified by the path-
name.

Adding Subjects to Existing Help Displays

You can add subjects and descriptions to the existing

HELP.DAT

file, stored under the

UTILS

directory on the hard

disk (drive C). Use your word processor or file editor to in-
sert new subjects and descriptions anywhere in the file, fol-
lowing the rules outlined previously in this appendix.

Note: Be sure to save the file back to disk in

ASCII

format,

not your word processor’s particular format.

Creating Help Displays

Creating Help Displays I-5