Adjustments to the Contents

Adjustments to the Contents

This tiny little application is almost entirely documented now. You need to add the
Tools menu and Understanding Centering to the Contents and to check the index. The
easiest way to tackle the Contents is with Help Workshop. Close all the Help-related
files that are open in Developer Studio and Word and open Help Workshop by choosing
Start, Programs, Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 Tools, Help
Workshop. Open ShowString.cnt by choosing File, Open and working your way through
the Open dialog box. (If you can't find the contents file, be sure to change the File Type
drop-down. It's probably in your Debug directory.) This is the Contents file for
ShowString.
In the first open book, click the View Menu item and then click the Add Below button.
(Alternatively, click the Window Menu item and then the Add Above button.) The Edit

Contents Tab Entry dialog box, shown in Figure 11.13, appears. Fill it in as shown; by
leaving the last two entries blank, the default Help File and Window Type are used.
Click OK.
FIG. 11.13 Add entries to the Contents tab with Help Workshop's Edit Contents Tab Entry dialog box.
Click the placeholder book named <<add your application-specific topics here>> and
click Add Above again. When the Edit Contents Tab Entry dialog box appears, select the
Heading radio button from the list across the top. As shown in Figure 11.14, you can
change only the title here. Don't use Understanding Centering because that's the title
of the only topic under this heading. Enter Displaying a string and click OK.
Add a topic below the new heading for Understanding Centering, whose ID is
HID_CENTERING, and remove the placeholder heading and topic. Save your changes,
close Help Workshop, compile ShowString.hpj in Developer Studio again, and test your
Help. Choose Help, Help Topics and expand each heading. You will see something like
Figure 11.15.
FIG. 11.14 Add headings to the Contents tab with Help Workshop's Edit Contents Tab Entry dialog
box.
FIG. 11.15 After saving the .cnt file and compiling the .hpj file, display the new table of contents by
choosing Help, Help Topics.
While you have the Help Topics dialog box open, click the Index tab. Figure 11.16 shows
how the K footnotes you entered throughout this section have all been added to the
index. If it looks a little sparse, you can always go to the .rtf files and add more
keywords, remembering to separate them with semicolons.
FIG. 11.16 The index has been built from the K footnotes in the .rtf files.
Now the Help file for this application is complete, and you've arranged for the relevant
sections of the file to be displayed when the user requests online Help. You can apply
these concepts to your own application, and never again deliver an undocumented
product.