hiutil
HIUTIL(1) General Commands Manual HIUTIL(1)
NAME
hiutil – utility for creating and examining Help Viewer indices
SYNOPSIS
hiutil -I FORMAT -Cf file [-1agv] [-m NUM] [-s LANG | PATH] [-r URL]
[-t EXT] dir
hiutil [-ADEFMST] -f file
DESCRIPTION
hiutil is used to create .helpindex files in the Latent Symantic Mapping
(LSM) help format and .cshelpindex files in the Spotlight help format. It
is also capable of examining Spotlight help indices using the modes listed
below. To examine LSM indices, use a version of hiutil earlier than 2.0.
Spotlight help indices are required in macOS Mojave or later. Spotlight
indices are not compatible with versions earlier than macOS Mojave.
The macOS help system automatically generates indices for local help books
(see ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd/). If your help content will be
hosted remotely, you may want to manually generate an index to include with
your remote help book.
Creation, management, inspection, and information modes are listed directly
below.
Create and manage modes:
-C, --create
Create an index file at the location you specify. You must provide
both a directory of HTML files to index and a path to an output
file, which will be overwritten if the ouput file already exists.
-I, --index-format
Pass the index format type as either 'lsm' or 'corespotlight'.
-P, --purge-caches
Terminate Help Viewer and helpd if they are running and purge
persisted Help Viewer related caches.
Inspection and infomation modes:
-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
Print out usage data.
-M, --list-min-term-length
List the index's minimum term length.
-S, --list-stopwords
List the index's stopwords separated by newlines.
-T, --list-terms
List the terms indexed in each file.
-V, --version
Print out the version of the tool.
GENERAL OPTIONS
These can be used with any mode.
-f, --file
Pass in the path to a file, either one to be created or one to be
examined.
-v, --verbose
Specify verbose output. Errors are always shown, but passing this
argument once prints out warnings also. Passing the argument twice
prints out errors, warnings, and progress notes.
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
Specify index anchors. The default is to have none. Without this
flag, there will be no anchor dictionary in the index.
-e, --exclude=PATTERN
Exclude files that match the specified 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 that match the specified 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
Specify a minimum term length. The value can be 1, 2 or 3. It
represents 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.
-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:
https://www.mycompany.com/help_v1/
-s, --stopwords=LANG|PATH
Use stopwords. If you have your own stopwords .plist, provide that
path. Otherwise, pass the two-character language code. For
example:
en English
es Spanish
de German
fr French
hu Hungarian
it Italian
sv Swedish
-l, --locale=LANG
Specify a locale for the index. 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
FILES
/usr/share/hiutil/Stopwords.plist
List of default stopwords in different languages
EXAMPLES
Create .cshelpindex file from a directory of HTML help:
hiutil -I corespotlight -Caf /pathto/myhelp.cshelpindex
/pathto/myhelpdir/
Inspect the anchors in a .cshelpindex file:
hiutil -I corespotlight -Af /pathto/myhelp.cshelpindex
Verbosely inspect the terms in a .cshelpindex file:
hiutil -I corespotlight -Tvf /pathto/myhelp.cshelpindex
NOTES
hiutil requires macOS 10.14 or later.
Darwin 05/22/2019 Darwin