The Help compiler displays either warning or fatal error messages. A warning message begins with the word Warning. A warning error indicates a problem encountered during the build that is not severe enough to prevent the Help compiler from completing the build. Therefore, a build with warnings produces a Help file that Windows Help should be able to open, but the file may contain problems in certain topics, such as missing graphics or hot spots that aren’t hot. Fatal error messages begin with the word Error. A fatal error indicates a problem that prevents the Help compiler from creating a Help file.
As stated previously, you use the REPORT option to display error messages on the screen and the WARNING option to specify the amount of warning information you want the Help compiler to provide. The Help compiler always reports fatal errors, regardless of the current warning level or report option specified in the Help project file, since no usable Help file results from the build.
While the Help compiler processes the Help project file, it ignores lines that contain errors and attempts to continue with the build. This means that errors encountered early in a project file may result in many more errors being reported as the build continues.
Similarly, when the Help compiler processes the RTF topic files, it reports any errors it encounters and, if the errors are not fatal, the compiler continues with the build. A single error in a topic file may result in more than one error message being displayed by the compiler. For instance, a typographic mistake in a topic’s context string will cause an error to be reported every time the compiler encounters a reference to the correct topic identifier. On the other hand, some warning errors—such as hot spots with the same hidden text codes (broken jumps) or any bitmap file errors, including “File not found”— are reported once per file, regardless of the number of times the problem occurs in the source file.