How Pop-Up Windows Work

Pop-up windows are stripped-down windows that do not include any standard window elements, such as title bar, menu bar, Control menu, scroll bars, or even standard-width window borders. They do include a shadow to make them more distinguishable from the main window. Users cannot move or resize pop-up windows.

Popup-topics can include most standard Help features, including any mixture of text, graphics, hot spots (jump hot spots, pop-up hot spots, or macro hot spots), and embedded windows. However, if you have a hot spot within a pop-up window, the first pop-up window closes when the users chooses the hot spot. In other words, you can display only one pop-up window at a time on the screen. Topics displayed in pop-up windows cannot use topic-entry macros, but they can contain jumps and macros executed from hot spots.

Pop-up windows appear on demand, usually when the user chooses a menu item, button, or hot spot. A macro in the Help project file or a WinHelp API call can also be used to display a pop-up window. For information about using Help macros to display a pop-up window, see Chapter 15, “Help Macro Reference.” For information about how an application can send an API call to Help in order to display a pop-up window, see Chapter 19, “The WinHelp API.”

Pop-up windows remain open until the user clicks the mouse button or presses any key (which includes choosing a hot spot within the pop-up window).

When displaying pop-up windows, Help follows these guidelines:

nThe pop-up window has approximately the same width as the Help window.

nThe pop-up window has only as much vertical height as necessary to display all the text. If the pop-up topic contains more text than will fit in a full-size pop-up window, the user will not be able to see the hidden portion of the topic.

nHelp attempts to position the pop-up window immediately below the hot spot so that the user can read both the text in the pop-up and the hot spot text that initiated the pop-up window.

nIf the topic to be displayed in the pop-up window includes both a nonscrolling region and a scrolling region, Help displays the region that contains the context-string footnote (# footnote) in the pop-up window.