Where are the help files located on the Mac?

[elipsett2]

I need to be able to access the Publisher v2.1 Help files in (at least) two languages, and on my Mac it seems to automatically select the OS primary language. 

If I knew where they were located it would be easy enough to arrange to access the right one, but I can't seem to locate them. 

Any hints?

Edited June 14, 2023 by elipsett2

[dominik]

2 hours ago, elipsett2 said:

I need to be able to access the Publisher v2.1 Help files in (at least) two languages, and on my Mac it seems to automatically select the OS primary language. 

If I knew where they were located it would be easy enough to arrange to access the right one, but I can't seem to locate them. 

Any hints?

Hello @elipsett2 and welcome to the forum.

I can't answer you the question about the help files in your computer. But I suggest to use online help instead, e.g. here:

https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/

At the bottom of the left pane you can select between languages and you could keep open two tabs to access help in different languages.

d.

[thomaso]

It is indeed disturbing that the app internal Affinity Help always opens in the system language but not the app language, although it appears to handle at least some search keywords in several languages.

Meanwhile even the Online Help always starts with the system language and needs to get switched manually. You could create an according link in your browser to the Online Help , for instance directly to the English version of a specific Affinity app and version:

https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/index.html

As a workaround you could copy the help folder / files from the app package by unfolding the app file via right click. Copied to any place on your disk eneables you to start the desired language directly in a browser window. The path for the English version is for instance in V1:

/Applications/Affinity Publisher.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityPublisher.help/Contents/Resources/en-US.lproj/landing.html
 

[v_kyr]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

As a workaround you could copy the help folder / files from the app package by unfolding the app file via right click. Copied to any place on your disk eneables you to start the desired language directly in a browser window.

Which is pretty unnecessecary and so just an unneeded doubling & wasting of local disk space! - Instead one can just directly access the already available and pre-installed local lang help-folder ressources in a webbrowser and then making one or two bookmarks in the webbrowser in order to have those always quickly in access!

• file:///Applications/Affinity%20Publisher.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityPublisher.help/Contents/Resources/en-US.lproj/index.html   (EN-US v1)
• file:///Applications/Affinity%20Publisher.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityPublisher.help/Contents/Resources/de.lproj/index.html          (DE v1)
• file:///Applications/Affinity%20Publisher.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityPublisher.help/Contents/Resources/fr.lproj/index.html            (FR v1)
• ... etc.

The OP has just to use the Publisher v2.1 installed Help files paths then, instead of the APub v1 paths I've showed above.

[thomaso]

1 minute ago, v_kyr said:

Instead one can just directly access the already available and pre-installed lang help-folder ressources in a webbrowser

I did not recommend this direct way because I am not sure whether such an additional access (from a webbrowser app) to certain files of a launched Affinity app could influence the app in any negative way. (i.e. possibly cause issues like the known that produce messages like "access lost" or others … ?)

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, thomaso said:

I did not recommend this direct way because I am not sure whether such an additional access (from a webbrowser app) to certain files of a launched Affinity app could influence the app in any negative way. (i.e. possibly cause issues like the known that produce messages like "access lost" or others … ?)

Why should it, never seen that "access lost" here, so I don't really know what you mean here. - The Apple/MacOS help book bundle stuff and it's implementation (the overall concept) for apps is pretty old and dates back some ~10 years here. - It basically consists of a bunch of HTML file resources which will be indexed by an MacOS help indexer tool in order to create language localized "help.helpindex" and related "InfoPlist.strings" files. The later are related to the help bundles important own "Info.plist" file. - However I won't go into any further details here about the howto's of help bundle creation, as that knowledge is not needed by common people (users) who are just going to open/read some of the deeper placed HTML files in an app help bundle. - Those interested in more details about the internals can take a look here and/or go through Apple's dev online pages about app help development.

So the important points here are more, that an MacOS app's help system has also to access the own contents included in it's app's help bundle. And an app itself does so by accessing/using short relative paths, as it knows what the shortest relative path calls to it's own app internal resources and help bundles are. - We here instead will use longer absolute path calls into an app's help bundle. Since we know the app of our interest resides in "/Applications" and is called "Affinity Publisher.app" we then can resolve the complete absolute path to the information HTML files we are interested in. -- User access rights here should be either way available, as a user otherwise (the other way around) wouldn't also be able to access the app help from inside the running app itself.

 

[MikeTO]

Help being displayed in the system language when the app is set to another language may be a limitation of macOS. The system command to show the help viewer doesn't offer an option to specify the language because macOS just assumes all apps are shown in the system language.

macOS apps that offer a language option like Affinity generally display their help using a non-Apple help viewer.

[elipsett2]

Thank you for the various responses, most of which would solve my problem neatly. 

I was especially pleased to see thomaso's and v_kyr's comments that I can just use a browser to link directly to the pertinent help file... something that had never occured to me.

Now that I know where the help files are located, I can do all sorts of things. I've been manipulating lproj files for years, but it never occured to me to actually look inside one! Learn something new every day etc. 

I appreciate the quick and very useful responses!