wine users - Nov 2001 - getting windows help files to display

I can run my programs with no problems but the help files do not display.
Is there some trick?

I am running RH 7.2 with wine installed using the rpm that came with it.

Thanks.

In one of the wine docs (I've read so many tonight I can't remember
which)
there are a couple of dlls that you can copy from a windows system to make 
them work.

F. James Rohlf wrote:
> I can run my programs with no problems but the help files do not display.
> Is there some trick?
> 
> I am running RH 7.2 with wine installed using the rpm that came with it.
> 
> Thanks.
-- 
Brett I. Holcomb
bholcomb@R777cableone.net
Microsoft MVP
AKA Grunt <><
Remove R777 to email

On Sat, 10 Nov 2001 05:10:03 GMT, "F. James Rohlf"
<rohlf@life.bio.sunysb.edu> wrote:
>I can run my programs with no problems but the help files do not display.
>Is there some trick?
>
>I am running RH 7.2 with wine installed using the rpm that came with it.
There is no trick, help file support is not great in
Wine. There are mostly 2 kind of help system in Windows:

- the old system (.hlp files) : Wine support is poor; if you
don't have a copy of Windows you can forget about it since
no Wine utility can display a 32 bit .hlp file. 
Winhelp (the Window utility) can run under Wine but I think
that calling Winhelp from the application does not work right
now (I may be wrong since the moment where it could work 
seemed near to me a month ago at least - I did not check
again since)

- the new system (.htm files I think, that is, html files) : I have
no idea about it but my guess is that it is not working too.
Maybe reading the html files could be possible using a standard
browser.

Gerard

F. James Rohlf wrote:
> I can run my programs with no problems but the help files do not display.
> Is there some trick?
> 
> I am running RH 7.2 with wine installed using the rpm that came with it.
> 
> Thanks.
I don't know about the Wine rpm included with RH but with Wine's own set
of
source files there is a directory called "programs". This directory 
contains a whole set of replacements for some typical Windows applications 
like Control Panel, Notepad and even Winhelp. This application can display 
.hlp files. If the software you're using uses .htm instead than you can 
probably view them with your Linux/Unix web browser. 

So, regarding the fake Winhelp, it comes as a Unix/linux shared object 
called winhelp.so. To invoke it from the Linux command prompt you put this 
.so file together with a symbolic link to the wine executable in one 
directory. The symbolic link has to refer to the Wine executable called 
"wine".

To create the symbolic link go into the directory where you copied 
winhelp.so and type "ln -s <path to Wine bin>/wine winhelp".
When you try
to run "winhelp" then automatically wine will run the .so file with
the
same name from the same directory. 

I would suggest you first check if RH's Wine includes winhelp or not.
Do this with "rpm -qlp <name of the rpm file>.rpm | grep
winhelp"
or with "rpm -ql <name of the rpm file> | grep winhelp".
If it contains winhelp.so then you'll see the directory where it's
located.
It probably also contains the symbolic link then.
Alternatevile you can do an exhaustive search in your file system for 
filenames with "winhelp".

If you don't find winhelp on your PC then you can still download and 
compile it yourself. This is quite easy.
Download a .tar.gz from the Wine web site (www.winehq.com). Untar it into a 
new directory, go into the main directory and enter:
"./configure" and then "make". Then go into the
"programs/winhelp"
directory and type "make". Then you should find a winhelp.so file.
Copy
this file somewhere in your fake Windows directory structure, create the 
symbolic link as explained above and try to run "winhelp", then select
a
.hlp file. When all this is done you may delete the directory you untarred 
Wine into.