WinHelp text color

[Bob Masta]

Greetings from a newbie to this NG.

Does anyone know how to get HCW 4.0 to use the
user-selected text color? My WinHelp text always
comes out black, no matter what the user has set
window text color to under Control Panel. Background
seems to work fine. The WinHelp "Options - Use System Colors"
seems to do nothing.

I don't want to force a color, just use the system colors.
I know this is possible somehow, since Microsoft's
own Help files work just fine in this respect.

Just as an experiment I tried playing around with
the HPJ Window Color background color settings...
they change the colors of the little icon in the HPJ
listing, but do nothing to the compiled result. These
aren't things I wanted to change, just trying to see
what's going on. Does the fact that nothing is working
point to something to you experts?

Thanks very much for your help!


Bob Masta
dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom

D A Q A R T A
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com

[Pete Lees]

Bob,

Does anyone know how to get HCW 4.0 to use the user-selected text
color? My WinHelp text always comes out black, no matter what
the user has set window text color to under Control Panel.

This suggests that you've explicitly applied black to the text in your
RTF source file. If you set the text colour to Automatic then the
colour of the WinHelp text should always match the Control Panel
setting.

--
Pete (Microsoft Help MVP)

[Bob Masta]

Post by Pete Lees
Bob,

Does anyone know how to get HCW 4.0 to use the user-selected text
color? My WinHelp text always comes out black, no matter what
the user has set window text color to under Control Panel.

This suggests that you've explicitly applied black to the text in your
RTF source file. If you set the text colour to Automatic then the
colour of the WinHelp text should always match the Control Panel
setting.
--
Pete (Microsoft Help MVP)

Thanks, Pete. The thing is, I haven't explicitly done
anything with color in the RTF, so I assumed that
it should default to automatic. How do you set the
text color to Automatic? Is this an RTF command?

Thanks again.



Bob Masta
dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom

D A Q A R T A
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com

[Pete Lees]

Bob,

How do you set the text color to Automatic?

If you open the RTF file in Word, you can set the text colour for
individual characters or paragraphs (using Format > Font) or for all
characters or paragraphs to which you've applied a particular style
(using Format > Style).

For example, if you highlight a paragraph and then select Format >
Font, you can choose a colour to apply to it in the Font Color field.
Setting this to Automatic should cause the WinHelp text colour to
match the Control Panel setting. If you choose a particular colour,
however, then this always takes precedence over the Control Panel
setting.

--
Pete (Microsoft Help MVP)

[Bob Masta]

Post by Bob Masta

Post by Pete Lees
Bob,

Does anyone know how to get HCW 4.0 to use the user-selected text
color? My WinHelp text always comes out black, no matter what
the user has set window text color to under Control Panel.

This suggests that you've explicitly applied black to the text in your
RTF source file. If you set the text colour to Automatic then the
colour of the WinHelp text should always match the Control Panel
setting.
--
Pete (Microsoft Help MVP)

Thanks, Pete. The thing is, I haven't explicitly done
anything with color in the RTF, so I assumed that
it should default to automatic. How do you set the
text color to Automatic? Is this an RTF command?
Thanks again.

Found it! From your site recommendations in response to my
tab-stop post, I got HelpDeco and ran it on a short WinHelp
file that works properly, then compared its RTF to mine.
By process of elimination I found that a \plain tag was all
mine needed. I never would have suspected that from the
description of \plain in the HCW.hlp file... sounded like it was
just to restore things to default state after a change, when
in fact it is needed to get the proper default state in the
first place!

Thanks again, Pete!


Bob Masta
dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom

D A Q A R T A
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com