Customize Help Viewer

Help Viewer Window and Navigation Pane

Here you can determine the looks and features available to the user of your help system as made available by the MS help viewer. 

Window with navigation pane, topic pane, and button bar

When checked uses the standard tri-pane window.

Open with navigation pane closed

When checked opens with navigation pane closed.

Auto sync

When checked: the current topic changes automatically sync contents and index.

Automatically show/hide navigation pane

When checked: the Navigation pane is automatically hidden when a user clicks outside of the HTML Help Viewer. This allows the user to see more of the screen when working in a software program. When the user clicks inside the help topic, the Navigation pane is reopened.

Don't Display Toolbar

When checked: don't display a toolbar

Save user defined window position after first use

When checked: after initial creation, user controls window size/position

Tabs

Absence or presence of the contents tab and index tab are determined by the settings Project Options - whether or not a corresponding .hhc or .hhk is specified.

Include Search Tab

A compiled help file can include a Search tab that allows a user to search through every word in a help file to find a match. For example, if a user does a full-text search on the word "index," every topic that contains the word "index" will be listed.

Advanced Search

Advanced full-text search allows a user to search using boolean, wildcard, and nested expressions. A user can also limit the search to previous results, match similar words, or search topic titles only. When advanced full-text search is enabled, the Search tab in the Help Viewer is enhanced.

Include Favorites Tab

Adding a Favorites tab allows a user to create a personalized list of favorite help topics. This list is saved so it will appear each time the help file is opened. To see an example of Help Favorites, click the Favorites tab in this help file.

Toolbar

Using the checboxes you can determine which buttons will appear on the Help Viewer Toolbar

• No Text on Toolbar Buttons
• Hide/Show button hides/shows the navigation pane. Alternatively, you can display a help window without the Navigation pane, or set up your window to automatically hide the Navigation pane when it is opened.
• Locate: Jumps to the current topic in the contents pane. If the current topic is not listed in the table of contents, this command will not work. Alternatively, you can specify that the table of contents automatically synchronizes with the topic that appears in the Topic pane.
• Next Topic: Jumps to the next topic in the contents pane
• Previous Topic: Jumps to the previous topic in the contents pane
• Back: move to last visited page
• Forward: Jumps to the next topic in a previously viewed sequence
• Refresh: gets the latest information instead of displaying what's in the cash. May be useful with external pages.
• Stop: Stops downloading file information. This is useful if your help system contains links to the Web. A user can click this button to stop a Web page from downloading.
• Home: Jumps to a designated home page. You can specify a home page under Extra Buttons.
• Font: Changes the size of the text shown in the topic display pane. Not every user has the same font size preferences.
• Print: If you are on the Contents tab, provides options to print pages, headings, and subtopics, or the entire table of contents. If you are on the Index or Search tab, it opens the Print dialog box to print the current topic.
• MSDN Menu: This is a menu that provides all the same features as the toolbars, with a few more features; some stuff from IE, Define Subset & in the Help menu are MSDN Library Help & MSDN Online, which jump to a topic in the MSDN and to http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/ respectively. This menu does not seem useful.

Help Viewer Toolbar Options menu

Opens a menu list that contains Home, Show, Back, Stop, Refresh, Print, Search Highlight On/Off, and Internet Options commands. All buttons that you add to your help windows will be listed on this menu. This enables accessibility shortcut keys for each command. The Internet Options and Search Highlight On/Off commands are only available on the Options menu.

• Internet Options...: display a dialog to change Internet Explorer (IE) settings. Changes you make here do not affect the online help or tutorials, but do affect your IE browser settings. We do not recommend you use this option.
• Search Highlight On: toggles highlighting of each instance of a word or phrase found with a search.

Extra Buttons

The below page boxes can be filled either with a relative address home.htm) or website address (http://...).

Home Page

If you specify a Home Page, an extra button appears on the toolbar as a 'base' location the user can jump to. 

Default Topic

The Default Topic page is very important. It is the page that the viewer shows when no page was specified when opening or the specified page can't be found.

Extra Buttons - Jump pages

Support and Frequently Asked Questions are examples of the good use you can make of the extra two buttons optionally available with HTML Help.