Authoring Apple Help Book in 2019 - ios

Question

I am trying to include a help book with my Mac OS application but I am unable to do so. When I click the 'Help' menu in my application, I get the search bar and a Help menu item but I get a 'content is currently unavailable' error.
I have tried using Jekyll but I couldn't get it to work. I have also referred to the Apple Help Book documentation but it is very difficult to follow. I have also read posts on StackOverFlow but none of them seem to work currently.
I just need a simple Help Book which displays my application name and says "This is my application".
I need help in understanding the Help Book directory structure, the Title HTML content and how to integrate it to my application using info.plist.
Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I hope you are not going to do a Help Book just to say to your users "This is my application," but you are going to do that just as a starting point for a serious help book that can help your users understand how to best use your app. If so, this is what I do:
Create a folder inside your project folder called MyAppHelp;
Create a folder called Contents inside the latter folder;
Inside this folder you should create the following:
Info.plist
PkgInfo containing the text BNDLhbwr inside
A folder called Resources
Thus, you should have a structure like this:
MyAppleHelp/
Contents/
Info.plist
PkgInfo
Resources/
en.lproj/
index.html
fr.lproj/
index.html
Then you can start editing your help book like any web site, using HTML and css. You can even share some of the code between your website and your help book. This structure also allows for you to have your help book localized in different languages. macOS will show the user the correct version of it automatically.
To know which keys you should use in the info.plist inside your help book, please see them here.
You should index your Apple Help book using Apple's own Help Indexer app, which you can download from your account at developer.apple.com (look for 'Additional tools for Xcode' in downloads). This will create .helpindex files inside each folder you created inside Contents, which will help your user search inside your help book. Important Update: From Mojave onwards, though, you must use the hiutil CLI utility to index your help pages in Spotlight help indices. These files will have the extension .cshelpindex instead.
You should change the name of the top folder from MyAppHelp to MyApp.help. This will create a package similar to a folder when you rename a top folder with the extension .app. From Monterey onwards you must have a PkgInfo file inside your help bundle to be recognized as such by the Finder.
To include any changes automatically into your app you should add your help book to your copy bundle resources build phase.
Finally, do not forget to add a Help Book directory name and Help Book identifier keys in the info.plist of your app to tell to the OS how your help book is called or is identified.
Good luck with your Apple Help Book authoring.