Creating a Pop-Up Window

Creating pop-up windows involves two steps:

nCreating the topic information that will be displayed in the pop-up window

nCreating the hot spot or custom control in the main topic that will access the pop-up topic

Creating Pop-Up Topics

To create a pop-up window, you must first create the topic contents that will be displayed in the pop-up window. Pop-up topics can reside in the same file as regular topics, or they can be placed in a separate topic file. Like regular topics, pop-up topics are referenced by their unique context strings.

Creating Pop-Up Window Hot Spots

After creating pop-up topics, you create pop-up hot spots for displaying the pop-up window. The pop-up hot spot can be text, a bitmap, a hypergraphic hot spot, a menu item, a Help button, a custom control, or a macro hot spot. The coding for a pop-up window hot spot has two parts:

nA word or phrase, formatted as underlined text (the hot spot text), that the user chooses to display the pop-up window

nThe context string, formatted as hidden text, that identifies the pop-up topic (what the user sees in the pop-up window)

To create a pop-up hot spot using text or graphics

1.nFollow the steps to create a standard pop-up hot spot.

For more information, see Chapter 8, “Creating Links and Hot Spots.”

To create a pop-up hot spot using a hypergraphic

1.nDefine a hot spot and then select Pop-up as the hot spot type in the Attributes dialog box of Hotspot Editor.

For more information, see Chapter 11, “Creating Hypergraphics.”

To create a pop-up hot spot using a Help menu item or button

1.nUse the ChangeButtonBinding macro to assign a pop-up macro to the standard menu item or button you want to use to display the pop-up window.

Or create your own custom menu item or button and define a pop-up macro for it.

For more information, see Chapter 13, “Customizing the Help File,” and Chapter 15, “Help Macro Reference.”

To create a pop-up hot spot using a Help macro

1.nFollow the steps to create a standard macro hot spot and define a pop-up macro as the macro to execute when the user chooses the hot spot.

For more information, see Chapter 13, “Customizing the Help File,” and Chapter 15, “Help Macro Reference.”