Visual Basic 6 Black Book:Deploying Your Program: Creating Setup Programs, Help Files, And Online Registration
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Creating A Help Hotspot
To let the user move around in a Help file, you use Help hotspots, which act much like hyperlinks. Help hotspots appear underlined in Help files, and when the user clicks a hotspot, the Help system jumps to the target of that hotspot and opens the associated Help page.
To see how hotspots work, we’ll add two hotspots to the opening Help page we developed in the last topic. Here, we’ll let the user jump to two new pages, as shown in Figure 30.10—a Help page giving help about the application’s File menu items, and another page giving help about the application’s Help menu.

Figure 30.10  Adding two Help hotspots to a Help file.
To add those hotspots to the helper.rtf file, we add this text:



Contents

Welcome to helper example application. This help file gives you help on
the menu items in helper.

To get help for the menu you are interested in, click a topic:

File Menu Items
Help Menu Items


To make the “File Menu Items” and “Help Menu Items” into Help hotspots, we give them a double underline, using the Microsoft Word Format menu:



Contents

Welcome to helper example application. This help file gives you help on
the menu items in helper.

To get help for the menu you are interested in, click a topic:

File Menu Items
===============
Help Menu Items
===============


Now that we’ve created two Help hotspots, we will connect a label, called a jump tag, to the hotspots to indicate where we want to jump to when the user clicks the hotspots. In this case, we add the jump tags FILE_MENU_ITEMS and HELP_MENU_ITEMS to our hotspots this way, marking them as hidden text with the Word Format menu (hidden text appears in a Word document with a dotted underline):


Contents

Welcome to helper example application. This help file gives you help on
the menu items in helper.

To get help for the menu you are interested in, click a topic:

File Menu ItemsFILE_MENU_ITEMS
===============...............
Help Menu ItemsHELP_MENU_ITEMS
===============...............


The text for our helper.rtf file so far appears in Microsoft Word in Figure 30.11.


Figure 30.11  Creating help jumps and their targets in Microsoft Word.
Because we’ve made the new jump tags hidden text, they will not appear visually in the Help file; however, when the user clicks a Help hotspot, the Help system will look for the page that has the same tag as the hotspot that the user clicked. How do you give a Help page a tag? We’ll look at that topic next.

Creating A Help Hotspot Target
To connect a Help hotspot with a page in a Help file, you place the blinking insertion caret in Word at the very beginning of the target page in the Help file’s RTF file, and select Word’s Insert[vbar]Footnote menu item to insert a new footnote.

In the Footnote And Endnote dialog box that appears, click Custom Mark in the Numbering box, enter the special footnote character “#” (that is, type that character # into the Custom Mark box), and click on OK. This inserts a new footnote in the document and opens a window showing the document’s footnotes at the bottom of the window. To connect a Help hotspot to the current page, you simply enter the hotspot’s tag as the footnote text.
Let’s see an example. In the previous topic, we created two Help hotspots, and in this topic, we’ll create the target the Help system will jump to when the user clicks the File Menu Items hotspot; the tag for this hotspot is FILE_MENU_ITEMS.
To create the page to jump to when the user clicks the File Menu Items hotspot, we insert a page break to start a new page and add the title “File Menu Items” to that page:


Contents

Welcome to helper example application. This help file gives you help on the
menu items in helper.

To get help for the menu you are interested in, click a topic:

File Menu ItemsFILE_MENU_ITEMS
===============...............
Help Menu ItemsHELP_MENU_ITEMS
===============...............
----------------------------------Page Break----------------------------
File Menu Items
...


On this new page, we can list the menu items in the application’s File menu, each with a hotspot to a new page, like this:



Contents

Welcome to helper example application. This help file gives you help on the
menu items in helper.

To get help for the menu you are interested in, click a topic:

File Menu ItemsFILE_MENU_ITEMS
===============...............
Help Menu ItemsHELP_MENU_ITEMS
===============...............
----------------------------------Page Break----------------------------
File Menu Items

Select the menu item you want to get help on:

NewNEW
===...
OpenOPEN
====....
CloseCLOSE
=====.....


To connect the FILE_MENU_ITEMS jump tag with the new page, then, place the insertion caret at the beginning of that page, select the Insert[vbar]Footnote menu item, and give the footnote the custom mark # and the text FILE_MENU_ITEMS, as shown in Figure 30.12.

Figure 30.12  Setting up a Help hotspot target.
Now we’ve connected the File Menu Items hotspot to the next Help page we’ve just created; when the user clicks the File Menu Items hotspot, shown in Figure 30.10, we’ll jump to this new page, shown in Figure 30.13.


Figure 30.13  Jumping to a Help target page.
Using footnotes, you can do more than just create Help hotspots; you can title a Help page, and we’ll see how to do that in the next topic.

Titling A Help Page
You can add a title to a Help page. To do that, you add a footnote to a Help page, giving it the custom mark “$”, and give the footnote the text you want to use as the page’s title.

Let’s see an example. In this case, we will add the title “File Menu Items” to the appropriate page in the helper.rtf file that we’ve been developing for the previous few topics. To do that, position the insertion caret at the beginning of the File Menu Items page, add a footnote with the custom mark “$”, and give that footnote the text “File Menu Items”, as shown in Figure 30.12.



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