The first step in creating a help file is to create a new Help Builder Project. Start by clicking on the New Project button in the toolbarmenu bar or selecting File | New...| New Project from the menu.

The new project Wizard is responsible for creating a new Help Builder Project for you. Projects are directory based and consist of a Project file with an .HBP extension, plus a set of template pages and bitmaps that are copied and used in every new project. As you build your project you will add to these files. Typically adding images or other resources like static HTML files or other documents or multimedia files that you want to embed into your Help File.

To create a new project give the new project a descriptive name which is used in the final Help File's title bar. Specify the directory where you would like to create the project. Preferably this is a directory that doesn't exist yet, or else you will get a warning that files might get overwritten by what Help Builder writes out for new projects.

Click on the Next button, and then click Finish to create the project. A new project will now pop up containing only an Index topic:

Since the project is new and empty you only have an Index topic at this point. This topic has some basic information on what you can do next. The new project starts up in HTML Document view, which is a preview of what the topic will look like when compiled. You can easily switch Document View Mode into Edit mode by clicking on the Toolbar or pressing Alt-V to switch View modes.

When you click this button you are switched into Edit mode. Edit mode provides a field based interface in which you can easily edit the content of your topic.

As you can see the generated Index topic is now presented as plain text with some minimal markup text (using double << >> tags) in the Topic Body. Other fields hold information about the title of your topic (Topic) and an auto-assigned Help Context Id. The UI also contains additional pages where you can provide input for additional fields that make more sense for other topic types. In this case we're only interested in the Body field.

You can now easily change the content of this topic simply by typing in plain text into the Body field. Note that although Help Builder generates HTML output, the text you type should just be entered as plain text - Help Builder automatically formats your text when it renders the topic. Only special markup text - like bold, italic, special fonts, lists, links etc. - need to get marked up. The idea is that most of your text will likely be just plain text which is easy to enter and work with.

To insert any common markup you can use the HTML Editing Toolbar which usually sits at the top of the form and is pulled down here for demonstration. Any markup pulled into the document gets inserted with double bracket tags, so that you can insert plain HTML or XML text and display it easily in a topic without it getting rendered. Any HTML typed into the topic will simply display rather than render.

The toolbar provides many useful and common features for markup and we'll look at the various markup options available later. But before we get into that let's create a few new topics first.

See also

Step By Step Guide