Typically the application manual and possibly additional help documents will be made available to the user under the Help menu at the top right of the application. To do this, you must first write a topic.dat file. The format for this file is:

One line for each 'topic'.

Two columns, as defined by perl -e 'split(/\s+/,$aline,2)'

First column is the HTML file (and optional section) for the topic,
relative to the app's help file dir.

Second column is the user-visible topic name.
      

For example, Gnumeric's topic.dat file is:

gnumeric.html   Gnumeric manual
function-reference.html Gnumeric function reference
      

When the application is installed, the topic.dat file should be placed in the $prefix/share/gnome/help/appname/C/ directory where appname is replaced by the application's name. The application documentation (converted from SGML into HTML with db2html) should be placed in this directory too.

The topic.dat file is used by the GNOME menu building code to generate the Help menu. When you define your menu:

GnomeUIInfo helpmenu[] = {
              {GNOME_APP_UI_ITEM, 
               N_("About"), N_("Info about this program"),
               about_cb, NULL, NULL, 
               GNOME_APP_PIXMAP_STOCK, GNOME_STOCK_MENU_ABOUT,
               0, 0, NULL},
               GNOMEUIINFO_SEPARATOR,
               GNOMEUIINFO_HELP("appname"),
               GNOMEUIINFO_END
        };

the line specifying GNOMEUIINFO_HELP causes GNOME to create a menu entry which is tied to the documentation in the directory mentioned above. Also, all the topics in the topic.dat file will get menu entries in the Help menu. When the user selects any of these topics from the Help menu, a help browser will be started with the associated HTML documentation.