Basic Working Procedures > Configuring Your Project > Background colors and help viewers

If you are planning to publish your project to HTML Help (CHM) you will also want to configure the appearance and features of the Microsoft help viewer used to display this format. These settings are stored in what is known as a "help window definition".

You can also define background colors for your topic pages and topic headers. These colors are defined in the HTML page templates for HTML-based publishing formats. You cannot define topic and header background colors for PDF, RTF or printed manuals.

The settings in Help window definitions are only relevant for the Microsoft HTML Help format. For details see Help Windows and Help Windows Settings in the Reference section and Choosing a help window in the Creating Topic Files section.

Background colors can only be set for the topics and headers in electronic HTML-based help formats, with the exception of Apple ©iBooks/ePub, for which the background color is always white. The background colors are ignored in PDF, RTF and printed manuals.

Background colors for HTML Help, WebHelp, EXE eBooks and Visual Studio Help

In all these formats the background colors for the topic and header are set in the HTML Page Template settings.

•In the Project Explorer, go to Configuration > HTML Page Templates > Default and set the colors for the header and topic.

You can apply different background colors to different topics by creating additional HTML page template definitions and choosing different templates for individual topics in the Topic Options tab behind the main editor window.

You can adjust the features of the Microsoft help viewer for HTML Help CHM files by editing the settings of the Main help window in Configuration > Common Properties > Help Windows.

1.In the Project Explorer go to Configuration > Common Properties > Help Windows and select the Main help window in the drop-down list at the top of the dialog window.

2.Set the size and position of the help window in the General Options tab. In HTML Help this setting will only be used the first time the user opens the help. After this Windows will apply the last size and position used by the user.

3.The title bar text is displayed in the title bar of the help viewer. The standard setting <%TITLE%> displays the title of your help project from your Title and Copyright settings.

4.Select the HTML Help Options tab and define the help viewer settings.

Note that if you want to control the size and position of the help viewer window in HTML Help you must change two settings:

1.Set the window size and position in the Color and Position section.

2.Deselect the option Save user-defined positions after first use in the HTML Help Options section.

If you don't do this your window settings will be ignored and Windows will save and use the last window size and position set manually by the user. Note that most users prefer the help window to remember their own settings. They dislike it when a program sets its own window size and position for the help!