Whew, we've now built a basic help project. It's time to build it into an HTML Help file. To do this fire up the Build Help Wizard from the toolbar.

Note: If you're building Help 2.0 Output go to Creating Html Help 2.0 Content

Note:
If either the Html Help 1.0 or 2.0 options are not enabled, the respective Help Compiler is not installed. Please see the Requirements topi for information on where to download the compiler and install it.

This page lets you choose what to create when generating your help output.

Create Html Files
This option specifies whether the HTML files get generated from your project. It's useful to turn this option off if you need to only generate a CHM file or if you've changed some project options like icons that don't affect the HTML output.

Build Html Help 1.0 file
This is the standard Help Format for Windows applications. If you're building end user documentation for your application you will want to create a CHM file which you can easily plug into most Windows based development environments such as .NET WinForms, VB6, Visual FoxPro, Delphi and so on. CHM is the most common Help format and we suggest you use it except for special situations.

Build Html Help 2.0 file
Help 2.0 is Microsoft's developer help engine that is used for MSDN and Visual Studio. It has a separate viewer. Help 2.0 does not have real desktop help engine support as CHM does, so it's not really meant for end user documentation although you can make it do that if you really want to. Help 2.0 requires that the MSDN viewer is installed. This help format is primarily meant for developer documentation that needs to plug into MSDN or Visual Studio .NET. Installing Help 2.0 files requires registration and some external tools which makes distributing these files somewhat difficult.

Don't build Help file
Sometimes you just want to generate the HTML files - for example when you prepare the files to be sent up to your Web site via FTP.

Custom Icon File
You can also specify a custom icon file if you would like to use custom icons. Be aware that this is an advanced feature and requires that you configure your topic types for custom icon usage and that you ship a separate icon file in the Windows directory. For more information see the Using custom icons in your Help file.

Select the topics to generate

The second screen of the Wizard is designed to allow you to optionally choose the topic trees that are used to generate the final help file. Sometimes you might want to generate documentation just for your end users so it might make sense to not generate the developer documentation into the final help file.

The dialog allows you to select and unselect top level topics that are to be included in your final help file or HTML output. By default all topics are selected - if you want to exclude certain topic trees from inclusion simply uncheck the checkbox for this topic. When you uncheck a topic this topic and all child topics are removed from the help file resulting in smaller size.

Click Next to get to the final confirmation page of the Wizard, then Finish and let 'er rip! Help Builder now goes through the process of generating hte HTML based content and then proceeds to build a CHM Html Help file. When it's done it brings up a finished compilation form:

Note:
If there are errors during compilation these errors will be displayed in the text area. The Html Help Compiler will frequently display some topic compilation errors that are non-fatal even though the error messages appear rather serious. In most cases, those errors are mere warnings and your help file will actually have compiled. To check Run the HTML Help File.

From here you can preview the help file, view the Web view of the project, upload your project to an FTP site, open Html Help Workshop or copy the CHM file to another location on your disk.

When you preview the CHM file it looks like this:

Help Builder also generates plain HTML output that you can copy straight to your Web Site and this output looks very similar:

To deploy these Web ready files on your Web site you need to do the following:

1. Create a project folder on your Web site
   
2. Copy all *.HTM files from the Help Builder project to the server
   
3. Copy the IMAGES directory to your server
   
4. Copy the BMP directory to your server
   
5. Create a TEMPLATES directory on your server - copy TEMPLATES\wwhelp.css into it
   

How you get the files to your server is up to you.

copy all of the HTML pages from the project directory (*.htm) all your images (probably all images in the IMAGES subtree) all GIF files out of the BMPS directory and TEMPLATES\wwHelp.css. Note that the latter file must be in a TEMPLATES subdirectory.

Help Builder projects are also fully compatible with HTML Help Workshop and you can open the project in that Microsoft program. HTML Help Workshop is Microsoft's Help Compiler SDK and is required in order to use Help Builder since the Help Compiler is distributed only in this package.

You can use Help Workshop for customizing the look of your help window. You can presize the window, set the initial view, whether content mapping is enabled, which buttons show on the toolbar and so on. Note that any changes made in Help Workshop will be overwritten next time you build your project in Help Builder.

See also

Step By Step Guide | Generating Microsoft Word Output