Tips and Tricks for Creating Help Files

Bullets

Bullets inserted in the normal way with Microsoft Word will not show up in your compiled Help file. However, there are three ways you can insert bullets.

1. Enter a bullet using the keyboard. While holding down the Alt key type 0183 on the keypad. Highlight the character that appears and set its font to symbol.
2. Use the Windows Character Map application (charmap.exe). This shows the characters available in a specific typeface. In Character Map choose symbol as the font and select the bullet character. Press the Copy button and paste the symbol into your RTF document.
3. Use the bullet.bmp bitmap that is built-in to the Windows 95 Help compiler. You can specify the filename for this bitmap, even though the bitmap is not in your bitmaps folder.

The same three techniques let you enter a range of symbols - em dashes are another character I regularly insert (using Alt 0151 but you could use emdash.bmp).

Jumping to the Help Contents (.cnt) from a Macro

The contents for Windows 95 Help files are stored in a *.cnt file. The obvious way to open this file from a hot spot or hyperlink is to use the JumpContents macro. However, this jumps to the topic you have specified to open if the *.cnt file can't be found (by default the first topic in the Help). To open the .cnt file use the ExecFile macro to open the Help, for example ExecFile(myhelp.hlp).

Error Messages

HC1003: A paragraph marker is formatted as a hidden character.

This means exactly what it says - a paragraph mark has been formatted as hidden text. This often occurs when a hotspot is the last word in a paragraph. Help Workshop will ignore the paragraph mark, so the two paragraphs will run together. To "un-hide" the paragraph markers search for the hidden paragraph and replace with an "un-hidden" paragraph.
In Word:
- Type "^p" (without the inverted commas) into the Find What box and check Hidden in the Font Format box
- Replace with ^p with Hidden cleared.

Downloading Help Compilers and Decompilers

For Windows 3.x and later, use the HCP compiler version 4.03. To download select hcwsetup.exe. Run this to unpack the compiler files. To compile a Help file run the compiler in an MS-DOS session under Windows.

For Windows 95 and later, use the Microsoft Help Workshop. To download select hcwsetup.exe.

You can "decompile" a Help file, reducing it to its component parts: rtf file, bitmaps, hpj file and so on. To download it go to http://www.geocities.com/mwinterhoff/helpdeco.htm.