What happened to help authoring in Mojave?

Question

john daniel OP

Created Nov ’18

Replies 2

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Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think Apple just deprecated the entire help infrastructure in Mojave.

I am doing final testing on a new build of my app. It really bugs me that help anchors don't work. It seemed like I could sometimes get them to work in the past. But now, nothing.

It is just a webview, so I decided I would just scrap the whole thing and do it all myself. 2 hours later, that's done. However, I still wanted to use those convenient anchors. I figured I would just call hiutil at runtime to extract the anchors and I would be all done. But hiutil doesn't work on Mojave anymore. It seems seems to create them OK. I can use hiutil to read a helpindex file created on Mojave. But I can't read the same helpindex file on Mojave.

I suppose that's irony for you. The one piece of the old help infrastructure that I thought I could salvage in my new version is now broken.

Congratulations, Apple!

That's the sound of one hand clapping.

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Answer 1

istudiochris OP

Apr ’19

Hi John,

I just recently came across the same problem. It seems hiutil is broken on Mojave.

My build script was set to use the local hiutil, so my anchors weren't working either.

I wound back to the High Sierra version of hiutil and everything sprang into life.

I did some tests:

chris$ which hiutil

/usr/bin/hiutil

chris$ hiutil -V

hiutil version 2.0 (60)

I've got an external caddy with all my older OS versions on:

chris$ /Volumes/High\ Sierra/usr/bin/hiutil -V

hiutil version 1.3.2 (55)

I created a temp dir and bunged some test files in.

chris$ hiutil -Caf test.helpindex ./testdir

chris$ hiutil -Af test.helpindex

"There was a problem unarchiving the index file."

Doing the same with the High Sierra version of hiutil works fine:

chris$ /Volumes/High\ Sierra/usr/bin/hiutil -Caf test.helpindex ./testdir

chris$ /Volumes/High\ Sierra/usr/bin/hiutil -Af test.helpindex

ais0001

ais0002

ais0003

ais0004

...

I can't get the Mojave version of hiutil to read back my anchors under any circumstances, regardles of which version of hiutil created the helpindex file.

Took me a while to find this as the only symptom you get presented with is that the Help system can't locate the help resource.

Frustrating.

I've built a test app that incorporates my main app's help and explicitly launches the help, using a UI button to open a page at an anchor.

I'll try calling an older hiutil from an xcode build phase.

Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Chris.

UPDATE:

I built a test app using Xcode 10 on Mojave.

Anchors don't work.

The app works fine on High Sierra.

I checked the contents of the helpindex file using hiutil -D and it's fine.

Conclusion (the same as yours): anchors don't work on Mojave.

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Answer 2

john daniel OP

Apr ’19

Hi Chris,

Look me up on the internet and send me an e-mail. I'm "etresoft".

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