Quick reference

T3 Help is a TADS 3 program that provides a quick reference to most classes in the TADS 3 libraries.

It does that by reading the actual source files and extract comments. The good thing is that it's never out of date. When you download an updated library, you just run T3 Help Generator and after 5 to 15 minutes, you have a fresh help file.

The bad thing is, of course, that the program isn't that clever. For instance, it chokes on macros, causing it to think that actions.t is practically empty. So, you can't use it to look up actions.
However, it's usefull when you, say, can't remember how to link two Door objects together, and similar situations.

Screenshot from T3 Help in the HTML TADS interpreter.

Download

You can't download the compiled help file here - it's roughly 1.6 MB big.

Instead, download this ZIP-file, which contains both the help-generator and the help-viewer.

In t3helpgen.t, modify the following macros as appropriate for your system:
#define BASE_PATH '/Program/TADS3/'
#define MAIN_INC_PATH 'include/'
#define MAIN_LIB_PATH 'lib/'
#define ADV3_LIB_PATH 'lib/adv3/'
#define LANG_LIB_PATH 'lib/adv3/en_us/'
Then compile and run t3helpgen.t.

When t3helpgen.t has finished, you can compile and run t3help.t to browse the help file. Notice that compiling may also take some time, as it needs to compile the 1.6 MB big t3help_hlp.h file that t3helpgen.t generated.

HTML TADS

I admit it: T3 Help works best in HTML TADS. It does also run in the 32-bit text-interpreter, but the lack of scollbars makes it a lot less usefull.
I'm pretty sure it won't run on 16-bit interpreters at all, as some of the data structures it uses exceeds 64 KB.

Of course, you have the source now, you can try to fix it if you want to.

Known bugs

Yeah, it's still buggy.
T3 Help tries to handle large pages (like the page for Thing) gracefully, by only showing the relevant part of the page, when you follow a link to, say, moveInto().
However, this doesn't always work, and you end up with an empty page.
In that case, click on [ Full page ] or type .full.

As mentioned, it doesn't understand macros, and often tries to interpret them as functions.
And finally, it doesn't remove explicit linebreaks from comments.

/*   Explicit line break:
 *.  <-- Like this.            */

And there's a few cases where it fails to interpret the syntax correctly.
But despite all this, it's still rather useful.

In my opinion, anyway.