I'm not an expert on this and I have a question. An application we've been
developing for the past couple of years has a help file (chm primarily) that
one of our people created that makes extensive use of context sensitive help
(using an hlp file) that pops up formatted (bold, italics, hyperlinks, etc)
help boxes (not the entire help file) in key areas so the user can get a
quick idea about something without having the entire help open up. A lot has
gone into this. We recently heard that Vista was going to support this to
some degree but that the formatting would not appear (something to that
effect). Some of the newsgroup posts indicate soemthing about a potential
free download from MS to better support hlp help. How does all this affect
the hlp help boxes I'm talking about? I'm not getting a clear picture about
all of this yet. My customers like the ability to pop up these little boxes
rigth where they need them and the formatting makes things much clearer than
just plain text. It seems like going backwards to eliminate this option.

Thanks,



Keith

Hi Keith,

This may answer some questions:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917607

Essentially, the .hlp format is no longer supported, and your company may
need to redirect its efforts to a different one. There will be a download
for your clients that need it to support this older format as an interim
fix. The free distributable it refers to is not yet available, but should be
early next year.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

"Keith G Hicks" <krh@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:ueFY21bGHHA.1216@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> I'm not an expert on this and I have a question. An application we've been
> developing for the past couple of years has a help file (chm primarily)
> that
> one of our people created that makes extensive use of context sensitive
> help
> (using an hlp file) that pops up formatted (bold, italics, hyperlinks,
> etc)
> help boxes (not the entire help file) in key areas so the user can get a
> quick idea about something without having the entire help open up. A lot
> has
> gone into this. We recently heard that Vista was going to support this to
> some degree but that the formatting would not appear (something to that
> effect). Some of the newsgroup posts indicate soemthing about a potential
> free download from MS to better support hlp help. How does all this affect
> the hlp help boxes I'm talking about? I'm not getting a clear picture
> about
> all of this yet. My customers like the ability to pop up these little
> boxes
> rigth where they need them and the formatting makes things much clearer
> than
> just plain text. It seems like going backwards to eliminate this option.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Keith
>
>

Gotta say this sucks. I shouldn't be surprised that MS would be arrogant
enough to completely remove a functionality that is so useful. I love chm
help. It's one of the things they got right over the years (I remember when
Office 2k came out and they botched the help in a big way in MS Access so
much so that many developers used the Access 97 help instead). The only
reason we use hlp help is for the popups. The text formatting in them is
useful because (I shouldn't have to explain this) you can highlight
important issues in the box and also you can use hyperlinks to then open the
main help file if necessary. It's all quite handy for an end user. I'm
wondering what the alternative is for providing similar functionality to end
users. I'm not seeing anything out there that covers a satisfactory
solution. I'm a pretty small company but I imagine there are a lot of us out
there (and much bigger companies too) who are just as pissed about this. If
anyone cares to respond to this I'd appreciate a useful response with a good
solution to the problem and not the ones I keep reading out there that just
says "MS is no longer going to support...." Rick's made that clear and all
the info out there that I've found says that too. I don't need it
reiterated. I need a solution. Looking forward to hearing from anyone that
can offer one. I still need the formatted popups whether they're hlp or not
I don't really care. How do we do that under Vista? (without our clients
having to install this extra tool from MS, and as a 2nd question, I'm not
clear on this either, will this tool supposedly allow for the formatted
popups or just the popups unformatted?)



Keith