Creating Help screens

[JoeKen]

I want to create some extensive help documentation for a rather large data acquisition program I have written.  Just writing to a text box, in a pop-up panel, within the code would become cumbersome.  Ideally I would like to use the .chm (compressed HTML) files that seem to be the standard these days, but I have no way that I know of to create these files.  There’s got to be a lot of different ways to create help files.  I would be interesting in hearing (er... reading) some suggestions.

[JoeKen]

Okay, I seem to have resolved this one myself.  I found HTML Help Workshop from Microsoft so I can now make my own .chm file and use ShowHtmlHelp to launch it.

I'm having a problem getting a specified topic to pop up when I bring up the help window though.  From what I've found in Help and the function panel, it looks as if when I want to bring up a specific topic I would enter the function like this:

ShowHtmlHelp ("Help file.chm", HH_DISPLAY_TOPIC, "topic");

where there is a file "topic.htm" included in the project and the contents as a topic when the project was compiled.  When I run the program however, I get "page can not be displayed" in the help window, until I click on the topic myself.

[scomack]

I will point you towards the SetCtrlToolTipAttribute  function call.

I don't know if it will help you in what you are doing, but when I stumbled across the command, I thought it seemed like just what I was looking for.

[Patrick_P.]

Hey JoeKen,

You should be able to use this to launch the topic in the help file.  You need to make sure that you are pointing to the correct file, both chm and htm or html.  The reason for this is that you can have a single CHM file that links to other CHM files.  For example the CVI help does this.  I have pasted an example call below that should work with the CVI help.  Hope this helps!

ShowHtmlHelp("C:\\Program Files\\National Instruments\\CVI80\\bin\\cvi.chm", HH_DISPLAY_TOPIC, "cviGlossary.htm");

[JoeKen]

Thanks that helped.  I needed the extension and also the path name (spelled correctly) of the topic's html file.