Defining Nonscrolling Regions

The main Help window and secondary windows display a scroll bar when the topic is too long or too wide to fit in the window’s current size. By using the scroll bar, users can scroll the topic to see the out-of-view information. In addition to defining the Help window itself, you can also set aside part of the window as a nonscrolling region, which displays text or graphics in a fixed location immediately below the button bar. Text or graphics in the nonscrolling region remain in place even when users scroll the topic. Because they don’t scroll with the rest of the topic, nonscrolling regions can have a number of different uses. Here are just a few possibilities.

You can use the nonscrolling region to:

nDisplay topic titles.

That way users don’t have to remember what topic they are reading when they scroll.

nKeep one kind of information anchored at the beginning of the topic.

For example, you can display syntax statements in the nonscrolling region so that users can refer to them as they read the parameter descriptions.

nDisplay custom controls that change with the content of each topic.

Because the nonscrolling region is part of each topic, the controls you place in it can be limited to helping the user with the information in the current topic.

nDisplay information that you never want to scroll.

The nonscrolling region can contain entire topics, especially if you want to use all the available window space without having scroll bars cover up part of the information. For example, you can create a topic that just contains a graphic, and you can display that topic in the nonscrolling region of a secondary window that is the same size as the graphic.

nCreate two different views of the same information.

Help can display either the nonscrolling or scrolling region of a topic in a pop-up window. Help displays the region that contains the context-string footnote (# footnote) in the pop-up window. If you include the context-string footnote in the scrolling region, you can have some hot spots in the Help file that display the nonscrolling region in a pop-up window and some hot spots that display the entire topic in the main window.