Character Formatting

Help topic files can include most types of Word for Windows character formatting. The following sections describe the character formatting properties that Help supports.

Fonts

Help supports multiple fonts and font sizes. Help attempts to match the typeface, type family, and size that the author specifies in the Help file. Font information is passed to the Windows font manager without special processing.

Topic layout within the Help window is based on screen fonts rather than printer fonts. Because most word processors perform their screen layout based on the installed printer, the layout in the word processor may not match exactly the layout in Help.

The following screen fonts are available on all Windows version 3.1 systems:

nCourier 10,12,15

nModern

nMS Sans Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24

nMS Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24

nRoman

nScript

nSmall

nSymbol 8,10,12,14,18,24

Windows version 3.1 also includes the following TrueTypeÔ fonts:

nArialÒ

nArial Bold

nArial Bold Italic

nArial Italic

nCourier

nCourier Bold

nCourier Bold Italic

nCourier Italic

nTimes New RomanÒ

nTimes New Roman Bold

nTimes New Roman Bold Italic

nTimes New Roman Italic

nSymbol

In many cases, the TrueType fonts provide better scaling and presentation quality than the raster or vector fonts used with Windows. If you have users with Windows version 3.0, however, they will not have any TrueType fonts on their system.

In addition to the standard Windows fonts, you can define custom screen fonts to ship with your Help file. If you don’t ship all your fonts with the Help file, there’s a chance that the fonts on the user’s system won’t match the fonts available in your Help font. When a requested font is unavailable, Help lets Windows determine a compatible font to use. The Windows font-mapping function usually produces a good match, but in some cases fonts might look quite different. To avoid font mismatches, you should ship any custom fonts with your Help file or use just the standard Windows fonts.

Hint:

If you are using Word for Windows, you should cancel the Display As Printed option (version 1.1) or the Line Breaks And Fonts As Printed option (version 2.0) because Help doesn’t use printer fonts. This option causes Word to display fonts as they will appear on the printed page. If you clear this option, your Help topics in Word will more closely match the way they appear in Help.

Special Fonts

Help does not accept characters from “special” or nonstandard fonts because RTF does not really identify them well. Windows Help assumes that text has priority and that all fonts use the ANSI character set. The “symbol” font is special-cased as a SYMBOL font, but there are no other exceptions. The Zapf Dingbat font is supported because it is treated as a symbol font. Nonstandard characters are not allowed.

Special Characters

Many TrueType fonts, such as Times New Roman, have special characters for basic typesetting symbols, and Help can display these symbols. The problem is that when Word saves a document in RTF format, it converts selected symbols to special RTF tags:

opening single quotation mark    \lquote
closing single quotation mark    \rquote
opening double quotation mark    \ldblquote
closing double quotation mark    \rdblquote
bullet    \bullet
em dash    \emdash
en dash    \endash

Help ignores Word’s RTF tags and displays nothing in their place. For example, special characters such as Word’s bullets don’t show up in compiled Help files.

Other “special characters,” such as the trademark symbol, do not have special RTF tags; instead, Word saves them as \’hh codes, which specify a hexadecimal character number. These are displayed correctly in Help. So if you want to use special characters in your Help file, you can edit the RTF topic files before compiling and replace the Word RTF tags with the appropriate \’hh codes:

\lquote    ==>    \'91 
\rquote     ==>    \'92 
\ldblquote    ==>    \'93 
\rdblquote    ==>    \'94 
\bullet    ==>    \'95 
\endash    ==>    \'96 
\emdash    ==>    \'97 

Each of the search targets has a trailing space, so be sure to include in your search, but don’t include a space after the replacement string.

Hint:

Don’t use Word’s Insert Symbol command to insert special characters: it inserts symbol fields, which the Help compiler doesn’t recognize. Instead, use the Windows Character Map application to copy the character to the Clipboard. Then paste the character into your topic.

Hint:

Although Help doesn’t support many special characters, it does support the nonbreaking space (CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE).

Bold text

Help uses the Windows default boldness, which is achieved by doubling the pixels that make up the font. In most cases, this creates a bold that is darker and higher in contrast than the bold in printed text.

Italic text

Italic text is supported, but it is generally difficult to read online. Help adds white space on the right edge of italic text to achieve a smoother combination of italic and nonitalic text. If you mix both italic and nonitalic text in hot spots (single underlines or double underlines), the added white space may cause broken underlines.

Small Caps

Although Help supports small Caps, the font you choose may limit its usefulness. When rendering small caps in Help, the small caps ascender reaches the baseline of normal text, making the text slightly smaller than the small-caps text displayed in Word for Windows.

Colored text

You can change the text color to any valid RGB value. However, Help may modify the color if the user’s display does not support the authored color or if the user’s background color conflicts with the authored color.

Unsupported Character Formatting

Windows Help does not support the following character attributes:

nSuperscript and subscript text. If you want to use superscript or subscript letters in the Help file, you can define a special font whose characters sit above or below the baseline. You can also use bitmaps of superscript/subscript characters.

nExpanded and condensed letter spacing.

nAll Caps text. To use capital letters in the Help file, just type the text in all capitals using the SHIFT key instead of formatting the text as All Caps.

If you use an unsupported attribute in your topic, Help will fail to display the attribute. For example, superscripted text appears as normal text.

Windows Help uses certain character formatting attributes to create hot spots; therefore, Help does not support the standard meaning of the attributes. The character attributes that Help supports differently from Word for Windows are described in the following table:

Note:

For information about using each of these specific formatting properties, see Chapter 8, “Creating Links and Hot Spots.”

Using Strikethrough Text in Word for Windows

In Word for Windows version 1.1, deleted text with revision marks is marked with the strikethrough property, which in RTF is indicated with the \strike statement.

In Word for Windows version 2.0, \strike is used to mark revisions and \deleted was added to indicate deleted text with revision marking. So if you save a version 1.1 file as RTF, strikethrough text loses its revision markings but looks the same on screen—strikethrough. Conversely, if you save a version 2.0 RTF file that has strikethrough text and open it in Version 1.1, the strikethrough text acquires the revised \deleted property.

Therefore, if you use strikethrough text to indicate hot spots in your topic files, you should not edit the RTF files in both Word for Windows versions (1.1 and 2.0). Instead, convert all your Version 1.1 files to Version 2.0 by opening them and then saving them as RTF. Or, if you must use both versions of Word for Windows, do not use strikethrough or deleted text attributes.

Inserting Superscript and Subscript Characters

Even though Help does not support superscript and subscript character formatting attributes, you can insert these characters into your Help files using either of two workarounds. You can:

nUse a font editor to define a custom superscript/subscript font whose characters sit above or below the baseline.

The custom font should be a larger point size than your normal body text so that you can place the superscripted/subscripted characters in the high or low portion of the font character.

nCreate bitmaps of the superscript/subscript characters and place them in the Help file using bmc references.

Make sure that you save the bitmaps without extra white space around them so that they display the same as regular text on-line.