Why yes, as a matter of fact that is a really long title. Nevertheless, there’s not a lot of documentation to be found, and certainly not a lot of practical advice that shows up easily. Now that I’m building help books for my applications, I’ve run into the situation where I update the help and then need to tell the Tips app to reload the index for an updated book. There’s no way to do that from the Tips app. Uninstalling the application that has the help book in it doesn’t trigger this, either. The thing to do is to fire up a Terminal window and use sudo, which is totally something I could trust my mother to do. Thanks, Apple.
sudo hiutil -P
That’s all – it just clears out all the cached help index files. They’ll get rebuilt the next time you look for help.