Make key terms in text hot spots that display popup windows defining those terms.Once you have created a title, you need to provide users with instructions for using Viewer. In particular, you'll want to provide on-line help that the user can read while viewing a title.
Viewer calls itself, and creates another instance of itself, to display on-line help. Thus, a Viewer help file has the exact same format as a Viewer title, and the process for creating a help file is identical to the process for creating the title itself: you author topic files, create a project file, and build the help file using the BUILDDOC command.
As you would expect, you can use any hypertext or multimedia features in your help file that we've covered so far. For example, you might:
Make key terms in text hot spots that display popup windows defining those terms.
Use bitmaps with hot spots to describe the different parts of a dialog box.
Play animation sequences with embedded or streaming audio to explain a series of steps in a procedure.
Add your own menus or command buttons. Use them to execute standard Viewer commands or your own DLL calls registered as Viewer commands.
Users can take advantage of any features you add, as well as the standard Viewer full-text search, when looking for information in the help file.
To accompany the USA.MVB title, we've provided a basic help file named USAHELP.MVH that you can customize for your own title. (Viewer help files use .MVH as a standard filename extension.) We've also provided the following topic files, which are used to build the help file:
| File | Contents |
| USAHELP.CON | Contents screen for help file |
| USAHELP.CMD | Descriptions of Viewer menu and button commands |
| USAHELP.HOW | Descriptions of procedures for performing different actions with the Viewer |
| USAHELP.GLO | Definitions of Viewer terms used in the help file |
| USAHELP.MVP | Project file for building the Viewer help |
You can customize these files in any way you want to for your title. Then use the standard build process described in Chapters 5 and 11 to build the help file. After you build, change the filename extension for your help file from .MVB to .MVH to identify it as a help file (rather than a book in your title). All .MVH files should be in the same directory as the .MVB files for a title.
Important:
To avoid confusion between index-file names, the title (.MVB) file and help (.MVH) must have different base names. For example, the title file TITLE.MVB and the help file TITLE.MVH would both use index files named TITLE.IND. To avoid this problem, you should either rename the help file or build the help file without an index file.