Displaying Readme Information

It is customary for software products to include late-breaking information and tips in a Readme text file. Typically, the Readme information is displayed prior to or in the early stages of the installation process. InstallMate's Setup wizard will do this for your product through the predefined ReadmeDlg dialog box (defined on the InstallMate Dialogs project page) if desired. The information that you provide here should be concise and immediately relevant for the installation process.

The Readme information itself is defined through one or more RichText resources on the RichTexts project page.

Note - If you want the Readme information or a more extensive release notes document to be available after installation, you should also provide it as a separate document, which you install along with the rest of your application. In that case, it might be a good idea to install a shortcut to that document. See Installing Files and Installing Shortcuts for more information on these topics.

The predefined ReadmeDlg dialog box uses a RichText control to display the information. You can create additional dialog boxes with similar controls if you need to display other pre- or post-installation texts.

How to include Readme information in your project

To include Readme information for use prior to installation, act as follows.

1. Go to the Installer options project page and check the Include Readme page box.
2. Go to the RichTexts project page and select the Readme1 resource.
3. Enter the desired text into the main text field, or copy and paste from a word processor.

This will the Readme text in a single language to your installer.

If you want to localize the Readme text for different languages, then take the following additional steps.

4. Create or import additional RichText resources on the RichTexts project page. Give them easy to recognize names, for example Readme_EN, Readme_FR, etc.
5. Go to the Dialogs project page.
6. Select the predefined ReadmeDlg dialog box in the Dialogs tree.
7. Click on the large text control in the dialog box preview. This displays the RichText attributes for the MainText control.
8. Make sure that the RTF name field is localized (the * button must appear pressed in).
9. Select the desired language in the main toolbar. If necessary, add new localization languages first.
10. Enter the desired RichText resource name for this language in the RTF name field (for example, if the current language in the main toolbar is French, then enter Readme_FR or whatever you called the French Readme text).
11. Repeat steps 9-10 for the remaining languages.

Also see Working with localizable attributes.