Diagnosing Mac Help keyword indexing?

Question

I am having difficulty coaxing the "Help → Search" function of my application to show topics related to the useful (and unique) keywords in my application. Only one keyword shows up.

Background: I created several html help pages (examples: index, accuracy, convert) in a subdirectory of my program. If I invoke the master help, the index.html file shows up fine. From there, I can click through to any of the other topic pages.

Problem: If I try using the keyword search function, only "Accuracy" and a blank indicator (that pulls up the index.html) show up. I have other keywords like "coordinates" that should point to a specific page, but aren't showing up.

What I've done so far: In addition to re-skimming the documentation (which at this time, I am a little bleary-eyed), I have run each page through BBEdit's syntax checker. I also searched StackOverflow for information related to the problem. Because the keywords are rather ubiquitous, this was the primary topical match, but I'm well-past that.

The Help Indexer log notes that it's indexed all of the html files, finding KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION meta tags in each (as recommended by the Help Book):

droot.html -- File has KEYWORDS meta tag content being indexed.
gc.html -- File has KEYWORDS meta tag content being indexed.
index.html -- File has KEYWORDS meta tag content being indexed.
droot.html -- File has DESCRIPTION meta tag used for abstract.
gc.html -- File has DESCRIPTION meta tag used for abstract.
index.html -- Finished parsing
droot.html -- Finished parsing
gc.html -- Finished parsing
(etc)

The *.helpindex file in the Release package (?/Contents/Resources/MacFizzyCalcHelp/ directory) is ~25k. I do not know how to inspect its contents, though.

Any thoughts on what I'm missing?

Answer 1

I found the following post on the Apple Support site useful when I ran into a similar problem with the Help topics of my Helpbook not appearing using the Search functions:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3442044