Help for HV - A HTML Viewer for the HP100/200LX Palmtop Computers

HV is an application that lets you browse through HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files. HTML provides a simple but very powerful means for representing hypertexts, i.e. texts with links to other parts of the text or to other documents.

The help file you are currently reading is such a HTML text. It explains how to move around in HV how to configure HV and how indexing in HV works.

Press the space bar to see more!


Moving around

The configuration file

You can configure HV for your needs by modifying the file HV.CFG, which must reside in the same directory as HV. The configuration file is split up in so called sections. Each section starts with a section name on a single line enclosed by '[' and ']'. Lines starting with ';' are comments.

The [system] section

The system section contains some general settings for HV:

The [Fonts] section

This section lets you specify the fonts to be used by HV:

The [Docs] section

This section lets you specify special documents:

The [Viewers] section

This section specifies what to do if a non-HTML file is encountered. The action depends on the file extension. Example:
   GIF=C:\BIN\SHOWGIF.EXE %s
If a file with a GIF extension is encountered, the program C:\BIN\SHOWGIF.EXE is started with the file name (%s is replaced by the file name) as an argument. Note that the specified extension has to be upper case. You can specify as many extensions as you like. ATTENTION: while running an external viewer, HV stll remains in memory and needs about 110k. The external viewer can only be started if there is enough remaining memory.

Indexing

When loading a document for the first time, an index is generated. Using an index improves access speed significantly, especially for large documents. The index is placed into two files, so that it has to be computed only once, and if you access a document for a second time, the index is readily available. The index files have the same name as the HTML document but have an .PAG and a .LAB extension.

If, for any reason, one of these index files got corrupted, you can rebuild them any time by choosing Rebuild Index from the File menu.

Indexing takes place in the background. The only thing you will notice while indexing is that the total page count (upper right corner of the screen) will be in parentheses and count up. While indexing, you can still do most operations. Thus, you don't have to wait until indexing is completed.


Press ESC now, to leave help (and return to the previous document).

Andreas Garzotto, June 1995