EXTRA INFORMATION INSTALLING THE HELP COMPILER In order to compile Help files, HelpBuilder requires the Microsoft Windows Help Compiler (HC31.EXE or HCP.EXE). These have now been placed in the Public Domain by Microsoft and HCP.EXE is supplied with HelpBuilder, however you are not being charged for this in your registration fee. HC31.EXE is supplied with both the Microsoft and Borland C++ compilers, Visual Basic and probably many other software development tools, so you will probably already have a copy of it. HelpBuilder can create projects without HC31.EXE but you will not be able to compile them without it. The HelpBuilder Setup program assumes that you wish to use the copy of HCP.EXE supplied and will place it in the same directory as the HelpBuilder executeables but you can change this to point to your own copy of HCP. To configure HelpBuilder, you can either edit HELPBLDR.INI (Not with HelpBuilder itself) or create a help project and select the Project/Settings menu option, then select the 'Compiler Installation' section. From here you can install the compilers of your choice. This is the recommended method. Note that each help project will contain the name of the compiler required to compile it to assist in portability. If you wish to use a help compiler other than HC31.EXE or HCP.EXE you can use this same technique to configure HelpBuilder as above. Note however, that your alternative compiler must be HC31 compatible (HelpBuilder does not produce input files compatible with HC30.EXE at present). Please note that HC31.EXE and HCP.EXE also require the file 'HC31.ERR' or 'HCP.ERR'. If this is missing the compiler will fail to run. HelpBuilder uses the HECOMP.PIF file to enable it to run the Help Compiler. This is placed in your \WINDOWS directory. If you have installed Windows on any other drive other than C: you will need to use PIF Editor to edit HECOMP.PIF and change the drive letter of the 'Program File Name' to the drive on which Windows has been installed. HelpBuilder requires that SHARE.EXE is installed on your machine to operate correctly. PAYMENT FOR SOFTWARE Please see the HelpBuilder help file 'Payment for and Registration of Software' section for information on how you can pay for your copy of the HelpBuilder software. MORE INFORMATION If you require any further information, please see the HelpBuilder help file 'Contacting the Author' section for information on how to contact the author. NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 1.05 - 3d Dialogs and controls - Redesign/improved ease of use to all dialogs - Norton Guides Help project import - Topic locator for fast access to topics - Automated maintenence of topic header file - Improved interpretation/Handling of Help Compiler error messages - Compiler installation and selection now performed in Project Settings dialog instead of .INI file - Topic Text macros for date, time, copyright, title etc NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 1.06 - Internal bug fixes NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 1.07 - Configuration of temporary file directory now possible - Inclusion of .SHG Segmented Hypergraphic files in projects now possible - Sample bitmaps added for inclusion/modification in help files - Ctrl+C now operates allowing Ctrl X/C/V Cut/Copy/Paste instead of activating colour dialog - Enter key on Topic Locator dialog opens a topic for editing - Wizard now has a dialog enabling the user to specify the component file names - Topic windows now display text in the default project font - Topic limit increased to 2048 files for registered versions, still 25 for unregistered versions - Bug Fix: Greying logic for View Sort orders menu options corrected - it previously left the first option always greyed! - Non ASCII characters (value > 127) written to .RTF file in \'XX format - stops a lot of 'invalid byte at offset' error messages - New toolbar for non-VGA users - 'Windows' are now supported and configureable - Topic links enhanced to provide support for: Bitmaps Macros Window definitions Jumps to other help files Hidden hot spots - Bug fix: changing project font while Topic Locator window open caused GPF. Now fixed - Bug fix: selecting large amount of text and changing colour or font caused GPF. Now fixed - 'Error 4639: Error at byte offset xxxx.' message now resolved to a topic name where possible - $TOPICDATE$ and $TOPICTIME$ macros added - Now supplied with HCP instead of HC31 compiler - Bug fix: now allows French accented and German Umlaute characters to be entered in topic titles and search strings and correctly writes them in \'RTF hex code format to the .RTF file for the help compiler - .MRB Multiple Resolution Bitmaps can now be added to a project NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 1.08 - Internal bug fixes - External include file facility now added so that HelpBuilder will create a Visual Basic (other tools in mind for the future eg VB4) file containing context identifiers. This module can be included in a VB project and the context ID's assigned to controls at run-time. This maximises maintainability between a help file and a Visual Basic application. - Sample Visual Basic 3 module included to enable easy inclusion of Windows Help calls in a VB Application - Updated help file documentation - Project Settings dialog now adds main header file to the project if it's not in the project - stops 'Missing Context IDs' problem - New text macros added: $TOPICFILE$ $TOPICFULLFILE$ - 'Glossary' demonstration added to sample project NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 1.09.001 - SpellChecker addon system built on - Edit/Undo facility added - Find and Find/Replace facilities added - Ability to stop project build added - Improved project build multitasking - User defined macros added - Printing of Topic Locator window added - Printing or Build Results window added - Support for project build tags added - Support for topic startup macros added - Context IDs dialog now stops duplicates being created - HelpBuilder now deletes its temporary files from WINDOWS\TEMP if Windows is shut down while Setup Builder is running. Previously the files didn't get deleted. Normal File/Exit however, has always deleted files correctly. - Accelerator keys standardised with Windows conventions NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 1.09.002 - Converted to allow compiler configuration and use of the HECOMP.PIF file so that the Win95 32 bit help compiler can be used by HelpBuilder - Results window converted to a conventional edit field NEW FEATURES TO VERSION 2.00.000 (Major Upgrade) - Complete re-write to use a database engine to drive the entire HelpBuilder product. - Topics can now all be stored in a single .TOP file instead of lots of individual .TXT files although you can have one topic per .TOP file. You can have as many .TOP files as you like. - Topic Locator window renamed to 'Project Files' and now stays open all the time, providing an 'expanding list' feature to navigate the topics and files in a project. Items in the list can be clicked on to open them. Bitmaps/icons etc are passed to the Windows Shell Functions such that the currently defined 'file association' is used to edit them. - Significant performance enhancements throughout. - Header files are now easier to maintain such that HelpBuilder will maintain all help files in a project and you can switch between the file to be maintained. The concept of a 'Main Header' has been dropped. - Context ID definition totally rewritten such that checks are now performed to stop duplicate IDs being created (works across all header files in a project) and to stop an ID being assigned to more than one topic. - All topics MUST have context IDs defined. HelpBuilder no longer supports 'generic' text being typed for context IDs such as numbers. - Build process now lists actual IDs defined in header files which have not been assigned to topics. This saves a huge amount of time debugging a help file! It also lists topics which are using IDs that have not been defined in any header files. - Entire data model for a project tightened up so that items cannot be deleted to create 'dangling references'. - Build tags feature dropped because build tags conflict with the new data model of a help file: build tags require topics to be allowed to have duplicate context IDs which this version of HelpBuilder no longer allows. Suggested workaround is to maintain two .PRJ files with each including the appropriate topic files. A new 'Output' field has been added to the Project Attributes dialog so that the two projects can create the same .HLP file. - Insert Special Character dialog added. - SpellChecker supplied as standard. NEW FEATURES PLANNED FOR FUTURE RELEASES - None at present KNOWN PROBLEMS/SOLUTIONS Please see the HelpBuilder online Windows Help File section 'Commonly Reported Problems'.