hiutil(1) BSD General Commands Manual hiutil(1)NAMEhiutil — utility for creating and examining Help Viewer indices
SYNOPSIShiutil-Cf file [-1agv] [-m NUM] [-s LANG | PATH] [-r URL] [-t EXT] dir
hiutil [-ADEFMRS] -f file
DESCRIPTIONhiutil is for creating and examining .helpindex files. These files were
historically created by Help Indexer.app, which now calls this tool.
There are several different (and mutually-exclusive) modes:
-C, --create
Create an index file at the location you specify. You must pro‐
vide both a directory of HTML files to index and path to an out‐
put file, which will be overwritten if it exists.
-A, --list-anchors
List the index's anchors separated by newlines.
-D, --list-anchor-dictionary
List the index's anchor dictionary in XML. This includes a list
of which files contain each anchor.
-E, --list-index-versions
List the index's version dictionary in XML. It describes the
system environment on which the index was created.
-F, --list-files
List all the files included in the index, separated by newlines.
You can use the -v option with this mode to get titles and
descriptions as well.
-H, --help
Prints out usage data.
-M, --list-min-term-length
List the index's minimum term length.
-R, --list-remote-url
List the index's remote URL. (This is only relevant for old-
style indexes which include one.)
-S, --list-stopwords
List the index's stopwords separated by newlines.
-V, --version
Prints out the version of the tool.
GENERAL OPTIONS
These can be used with any mode.
-f, --file
P ass in the path to a file, either one to be created or one
to be examined.
-v, --verbose
Verbose output. Errors are always shown, but passing this argu‐
ment once will print out warnings too. Twice will print out
errors, warnings and progress notes. This can be a lot of data!
CREATE OPTIONS
These can only be used with the create mode.
-1 Index one file at a time. The default is to use a queue to index
several files in parallel. In combination with -vvv, this option
can be useful in determining which file an error message is
from.
-a, --anchors
Index anchors. The default is not to. Without this flag, there
will be no anchor dictionary in the index.
-e, --exclude=PATTERN
Exclude files which match this pattern. Uses NSPredicate's
MATCHES comparison method on the file's path relative to the
directory being indexed. This option can be passed as many times
as necessary, once per pattern. Exclusions take precedence over
files included with -i.
-g, --generate-summaries
Generate summary text. This can be slow, but is useful if you
don't have DESCRIPTION meta tags on some pages.
-i, --include=PATTERN
Include files which match this pattern. Uses NSPredicate's
MATCHES comparison method on the file's path relative to the
directory being indexed. The default patterns to index are
".htm" and ".html". If these defaults are undesirable, you may
use -e above to exclude them. This option can be passed as many
times as necessary, once per pattern.
-m, --min-term-length=NUM
Minimum term length. Can be 1, 2 or 3. This is the number of
consecutive tokens (typically a character) required for a term
not to be ignored by the indexer. Recommended values are 3 for
English and 1 for Chinese and other ideographic languages.
-s, --stopwords=LANG|PATH
Use stopwords. If you have your own stopwords .plist, provide
that path. Otherwise, pass the two-character language code:
en English
es Spanish
de German
fr French
hu Hungarian
it Italian
sv Swedish
-r, --remote-url=URL
Include a remote URL with the index. This is only useful in Type
1 or Type 2 help books, because the URL is in the help bundle's
Info.plist for Type 3 books. The URL should be fully qualified,
for example:
-l, --locale=LANG
Index for a specific locale. Instead of having to boot into the
locale to index, pass the language code or locale identifier
here to index for that language. Example locale identifiers:
en_US
US English
es_ES
Spanish
de German
fr French
hu Hungarian
ru_RU
Russian
https://www.mycompany.com/help_v1/
FILES
/usr/share/hiutil/Stopwords.plist
List of default stopwords in different
languages
EXAMPLES
Here's what you'll mostly use this tool for, creating a help index:
hiutil-Caf /tmp/myhelp.helpindex myHelpDirectory
And if you then want to make sure that worked as expected:
hiutil-Af /tmp/myhelp.helpindex
Here's how to index .xml files as well, while ignoring everything in the
idx directory in the root of your help folder:
hiutil-Caf /tmp/help.helpindex -i ".*.xml$" -e "idx/.*" myhelpdir
NOTEShiutil requires Mac OS X 10.6 or greater.
Darwin April 28, 2024 Darwin
