Changing the Standard Appearance of Hot Spots

A standard hot spot in Windows Help means that the hot spot appears as green, solid- or dotted-underlined text to the user. You can change the default appearance of hot spots by:

nRemoving both the green color and underline (invisible hot spots).

nRemoving just the green color (underlined hot spots).

nChanging the green color and removing the underline (custom hot spots).

No matter how you change the appearance of hot spots, the Windows Help cursor changes to a hand pointer when it is over the hot-spot text. You may want to change the default appearance of hot spots to create a custom look for your Help file.

Note:

Changing the standard appearance of hot spots may or may not be a good idea. It depends on why you are creating the Help file. If you are creating Help for a standard Windows application, you may not want to have your hot spots look different from the standard that Windows users recognize. On the other hand, if you are creating a Help file for your personal use, changing the hot spots may be essential to getting the look you want. For more discussion about these issues, see Chapter 4, “Help Authoring Guidelines.”.

Note:

Changing the appearance of jump hot spots, pop-up hot spots and macro hot spots involves essentially the same procedures.