Windows now imposes severe restrictions on accessing HTML Help CHM files on networks and the Internet. File links will now generally not work at all and HTML Help itself is also severely restricted.

Without registry changes on the user's computer HTML Help now cannot be used at all on networks. EC Software has produced a small free tool called HHReg to help with this problem, which can be downloaded here:

HHReg CHM Utility

However, it is really better to use WebHelp for help on networks and on the Internet. These registry changes must be made on every computer that needs to access the help, and although HHReg can be integrated in your install process opening up these registry keys on your users' computers does represent a security risk.

Tab stops are unknown in HTML, it simply doesn't support them at all. Spaces also don't work for indents in HTML because all groups of spaces are ignored and displayed as a single space. Help & Manual converts multiple spaces to alternating hard and soft spaces to solve this problem but this will still not be accurate for tabular data.

If you need to create accurate spacing to format code examples use indented paragraphs (these are converted automatically in HTML-based output formats) or tables. You can use multiple spaces for indenting in code examples if you turn word wrap off in the paragraph settings – then all spaces will be non-breaking spaces, which will render correctly.

Also use tables to create tabulated lists in HTML-based output formats.

This is probably a Microsoft HTML Help Workshop installation problem. To correct this proceed as follows:

1.Uninstall MS HTML Help Workshop.

2.Download the latest version from our website at http://www.ec-software.com/reshelp.htm

3.Log on to a Windows account with administrator rights (this is essential!) and install the new version.

Full-text search for WebHelp is only supported in the Professional and Server versions of Help & Manual because a royalty-free license for the search indexing tool is required.

When publishing to WebHelp you should also make sure that your user account has full read-write access permissions to the Help & Manual program directory. Not having write access here can sometimes cause generation of the search index to fail.

You can change these texts and also select graphics files to use as buttons instead of the texts. In the Project Explorer select the Default template in Configuration > HTML Page Templates to change these texts.

If you want to get more fancy and do things like adding buttons with mouseover effects you will need to edit the HTML code of the template yourself. See Using HTML Templates for more information on editing HTML templates.

By default the title bar of the help viewer displays the Project Title entered in Configuration > Common Properties > Title & Copyright.

This text is inserted in the help window title by inserting the <%TITLE%> variable in the help window definition. This makes it possible to define different titles to be displayed when topics are displayed in external windows using different help window definitions:

Go to Configuration > Common Properties > Help Windows. Select the Main help window type and check the Title bar text: field. If you insert <%TITLE%> here it will insert the topic title, but you can enter any text you like.

Note that if a different title is assigned to the current help window this has priority over the Help Title entered in the Title & Copyright section. The help window title will then be displayed in the help viewer title bar when a topic using the corresponding window type is displayed.

This is a bug in the Microsoft HTML Help viewer. Non-English HTML Help files always display "HTML Help" in the title bar when they are displayed by Windows versions with a different language from the language of the help file. Only the titles of English help files are displayed correctly on all language versions of Windows.

The only known solution is to set the Language of the help file in Configuration > Common Properties > Language Settings to English (United States) if this is possible for your help project. (This is generally possible for all western European languages without special character sets.)

See About project language settings for more details.

In the Project Explorer go to Configuration > Publishing Options > HTML Help > HTML Export Options and deselect the option If an image has no caption export file name as hint (ALT tag).

Note that these are shared options. They can also be accessed in the WebHelp and Visual Studio Help sections.

By default, HTML Help only supports plain-text popups without any formatting. Help & Manual provides another solution for formatted popups in HTML Help. See Creating popup topics for details

Help & Manual generates all the files needed for viewing and editing HTML Help projects with the MS HTML Help Workshop application. However, these files are normally deleted automatically after publishing.

To prevent this deselect the option Delete temporary files after compilation in the Publish dialog when you publish your project to HTML Help. You will then find all the project files in the \~tmpchm folder in your project directory (the directory containing your project file).

Help & Manual includes 42 predefined icons that can be used in the HTML Help TOC by selecting Project > Manage Topics > Change > Icon. These icons are predefined by HTML Help and they are the only ones that are available. Although the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop documentation suggests that these default icons can be replaced by a custom icon strip this feature has never actually worked in HTML Help. Please complain to Microsoft. Loudly.

This is a restriction of HTML Help that cannot be changed. The # character is reserved for bookmark (anchor) references from URLs and cannot be used in the paths. The only solution is to make sure that there are no # characters in the paths to your help files.

Just execute the hh.exe HTML Help viewer with the name of the help file as the first parameter:

HH "myhelp.chm"

HH.exe is the HTML Help executable. It is located in the Windows directory does not require a path.

Examples:

Note that topic names are referenced as Topic ID + .htm in all lower case characters. (The standard extension is .htm but this can be changed in Configuration > Publishing Options > HTML Help > HTML Export Options.)

HH "myhelp.chm::/requestedtopic.htm"

Opens the file myhelp.chm and displays the topic requestedtopic.htm. The "::/" in the parameter separates the requested topic (the html file name in the internal structure of the .chm file).

HH "myhelp.chm::/requestedtopic.htm#paragraph2"

Opens the file myhelp.chm and displays the topic requestedtopic.htm and jumps to the topic anchor paragraph2.

HH -mapid 123456 myhelp.chm

Opens the file myhelp.chm and displays a topic referring to its help context number.

Select Context Tool in the Tools tab and then select the option Export Map File. This exports the Topic IDs and corresponding context numbers to a standard map file. See The Help Context Tool for full instructions.