Basic Working Procedures > Configuring Your Project

After creating your project it's a good idea go through the Configuration section of your project in the Project Explorer and check all your basic settings, which are initially set to default values. You can change these settings at any time, but some are easy to forget, like the help title, window titles and copyright information and so it's a good idea to get into the habit of doing a check whenever you start a new project.

This topic lists the basic settings in Configuration that you should always check when you create a new project. The other sections are also important but these generally contain things that you will edit while working on or publishing your project. For full details see the Project Configuration chapter.

The first thing you want to do is to enter the title of your project, the name of the author, your copyright notice and so on.

•Select Title & Copyright in Configuration > Common Properties in the Project Explorer.

•Enter your details. You can insert the version numbers and other information you store here in your project topics with variables – see here for a list.

See Title & Copyright in the Project Configuration chapter for details on the settings.

The default topic in your help is the topic that is automatically displayed when the help is opened in HTML Help, WebHelp, Visual Studio Help (MS Help 2.0 and MS Help 3.0) and Windows Exe eBooks (this feature is not supported in Apple iBooks®/ePub eBooks). If you don't set a topic the help will open at the first topic containing text in your TOC.

1.Select Language Settings in Configuration > Common Properties.

2.Select the topic ID of the default topic in the Default ("Home") topic: field.

One of the most important things to check is your language settings. Help & Manual supports almost all international languages but you need to make sure that your project is configured correctly to handle the language you are using, even if it is English or a common Western European language.

See International languages setup for full details!

You probably want the Help Title you enter in Title & Copyright section of Project Configuration to be displayed in the title bar of your published help in HTML Help. This is normally done with the <%TITLE%> variable but you can also enter a different text manually if you like.

Important: This setting is only for HTML Help (CHM) output files. All other output formats where the title is relevant take the title directly from the Title & Copyright section.

1.Select Help Windows in Configuration > Common Properties.

2.Click on the name of the help window whose title you want to change. If you have not defined any additional help windows only the standard Main help window type will be displayed. See Using secondary windows for more information.

3.In the General tab, check that the <%TITLE%> variable is entered in the Title bar text: field. If it is not just type it in manually. Alternatively you can type in a title manually but this will not be updated automatically if you change your project title.

See Help Windows and Help Windows Settings in the Reference section background information.

All the output formats you can generate with Help & Manual can be customized with a large number of options in your Project Configuration. You will only need to check and adjust the settings for the formats you are actually going to use, of course.

See Configuring Your Output and Project Configuration chapter for details on all the individual settings in these sections.