Doc-To-Help scripts are code modules written in the VBScript. They can be used to modify the behavior of paragraph and character styles during compilation. If you are familiar with event-driven languages such as Visual Basic, you can think of a script as an "event handler" for a style. Just as the Click event is fired when the user clicks a button in a Visual Basic application, a script is executed whenever Doc-To-Help encounters a topic or a hot spot defined by a scripted style.
You can perform the following operations in script code:
• Create top-level and secondary index keywords.
• Create named topic groups.
• Assign index keywords and groups to topics.
• Assign context-sensitive Help IDs to topics.
• Modify the link tags of topics and hot spots.
You can perform all of these operations in Doc-To-Help's authoring environment using techniques outlined elsewhere. If the notion of writing code seems daunting, then you are not required to use scripts at all. However, a simple script can save you many hours of tedious labor. This is especially true in cases where the title of a topic or the text of a hot spot can be split apart or rearranged to yield a textual match or a different focal point for an index entry. For example, given a set of topic titles of the form Adjective Noun, you could write a script to parse the title and associate three index keywords with each topic:
Adjective noun
nouns
nouns, Adjective
Note that you can control both the capitalization and the number (singular or plural) to conform to standard indexing conventions. You can also employ secondary keywords to improve the readability of the index:
Adjective noun
nouns
Adjective
Suppose further that the topics are organized into several documents, with each document describing the features of a particular Widget. With just a few more lines of code, you could extend the index profile for each topic as follows:
Adjective noun
Adjective noun, of Widget
nouns
nouns, Adjective
nouns, of Widget
Widget
Widget, Adjective noun
Widget, nouns of
If secondary keywords are used, the reader sees:
Adjective noun
of Widget
nouns
Adjective
of Widget
Widget
Adjective noun
nouns of
If you have to document hundreds of nouns for dozens of widgets, then maybe writing a script isn't such a crazy idea after all!
More:
Scripts are Subroutines