Help: Compiling and Testing Your Help File

Once your Help authoring is finished, you can compile your Help file. If you’re trying out the techniques described in these articles, perhaps by working through the Scribble tutorial in Tutorials, and you’ve chosen to author the application’s Help files, use the following procedure to see the results.

To compile and test the application’s .HLP file, use one of the following :

  • Compile the Help project (.HPJ) file from within the integrated development environment by selecting the .HPJ file from the file list and then selecting Build .hpj option from the Build menu.

  • Build your project.  This will invoke the custom build rules on your project’s .hpj, .cnt and resource.h files.

  • Compile at the command line by exporting a makefile (Export makefile option in Project menu) and then issuing

    nmake /f proj**.mak CFG=”**proj - Win32 Debug” .\Debug\proj.hlp

  • Run HCW.EXE,  load your project’s .hpj file and compile the .HLP file.

  • For Visual C++ 6.0, MakeHelp.bat is still provided by the AppWizard for projects created with support for context-sensitive help.  So, you can still run MakeHelp.bat from the command line. to generate a .HLP file.

    You may have to also run VCVars32.bat by typing at the command line VCVars32target, where target is either x86, m68k, mppc.

See Also   Help: The Help Project File, Help: The MakeHm Tool