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I am having difficulty coaxing the "Help → Search" function of my application to show topics related to the useful (and unique) keywords in my application. Only one keyword shows up.

Background: I created several html help pages (examples: index, accuracy, convert) in a subdirectory of my program. If I invoke the master help, the index.html file shows up fine. From there, I can click through to any of the other topic pages.

Problem: If I try using the keyword search function, only "Accuracy" and a blank indicator (that pulls up the index.html) show up. I have other keywords like "coordinates" that should point to a specific page, but aren't showing up.

What I've done so far: In addition to re-skimming the documentation (which at this time, I am a little bleary-eyed), I have run each page through BBEdit's syntax checker. I also searched StackOverflow for information related to the problem. Because the keywords are rather ubiquitous, this was the primary topical match, but I'm well-past that.

The Help Indexer log notes that it's indexed all of the html files, finding KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION meta tags in each (as recommended by the Help Book):

droot.html -- File has KEYWORDS meta tag content being indexed.
gc.html -- File has KEYWORDS meta tag content being indexed.
index.html -- File has KEYWORDS meta tag content being indexed.
droot.html -- File has DESCRIPTION meta tag used for abstract.
gc.html -- File has DESCRIPTION meta tag used for abstract.
index.html -- Finished parsing
droot.html -- Finished parsing
gc.html -- Finished parsing
(etc)

The *.helpindex file in the Release package (?/Contents/Resources/MacFizzyCalcHelp/ directory) is ~25k. I do not know how to inspect its contents, though.

Any thoughts on what I'm missing?

Community
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jim_carson
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3 Answers3

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I found the following post on the Apple Support site useful when I ran into a similar problem with the Help topics of my Helpbook not appearing using the Search functions:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3442044

Jadent
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I just had the issue of the blank Apple help entry and after several days of trying everything I could think of, finally found the solution. Add META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX" to the blank entry's page (in my case it was index.html, aka the landing page or access page). I then re-indexed the HTML pages and lo, no more blank entry. No need to even delete the help viewer cache.

[Edited as tags hid content :-]

Trev
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There are many reasons of problems. Once I found that apple developer documentation has a mistake (in describing anchors). Did you register help book in application Info.plist? Does help book contains own info plist file? You can check helpindex file using hiutil. I hope this help you.

toohtik
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  • Hi, thank you for the suggestions. The help book is registered in the application's info.plist file, but did not contain its own, separate info.plist file. Creating one didn't seem to affect the underlying behavior. The Help Indexer/hiutil returns the same diagnostics as above. Thanks, again. – jim_carson Jan 19 '12 at 01:48