What is wxWidgets Help?

wxWidgets is a rapidly growing cross-platform programming framework that supports both HtmlHelp and its own help format. HtmlHelp will only work under Windows, but wxWidgets Help will work in Windows, Unix and on the Apple Mac. The file extension for wxWidgets Help is ".htb" and when you compile, this file will be saved in the "wxWidgets" folder below your Project folder.

Note: The "HtmlHelp" folder is used for the temporary files when compiling, rather than recreating all these files in another temporary folder. So if you are switching between HtmlHelp and wxWidgets Help, ensure that you have "Quick Compile" unchecked. This will force all pages to be refreshed during compile.

Displaying wxWidgets Help

Fast-Help comes with a redistributable viewer called "HelpView.exe", which is in the "Compilers" folder below the Fast-Help installation folder. When you select "Project | Display | wxWidgets Help", the following command is run:

  "C:\Folder path\HelpView.exe" "C:\Location of help file\YourHelpFile.htb"

and it is loaded.

Differences between HtmlHelp and wxWidgets Help

• The tri-pane display, with button bar at the top, navigation pane on the left and content pane on the right is very similar to HtmlHelp, but while you have the Contents, Index and Search tabs, there is no Favorites tab.
• The button bar is limited to the following buttons:
  Hide/Show, Go Back, Go Forward, Go Up one Level, Previous Page, Next Page, Print and Font display options.
• When you display your help file, you initially only see one heading, which is the title of your help file. When you click on it, the default topic will be displayed. The idea behind this is that you can have multiple help files loaded within the same viewer.
• You can only print one topic at a time.
• On the Index tab, the keywords do not appear initially, but you can use the [Show All] button to display them.
• A nice feature is Bookmarks, available on the Contents tab. You can add the current page to your Bookmarks list and these will be saved when you close the Help File, allowing you to have something akin to a favorites list.
• Although the nonscroll/heading region is displayed above your topic, it is not a "non-scroll" region in wxWidgets Help. It will scroll with the rest of the page. This is because of the lack of support for JavaScript. Also, the nonscroll region does not have a background color, as it does in HtmlHelp.
• Formatting is also slightly different between HtmlHelp and wxWidgets Help, because HtmlHelp uses Internet Explorer to render its pages, whereas wxWidgets Help relies upon itself to interpret the html. Unfortunately it does not render the formatting as well as HtmlHelp. So in order to accommodate this, a simpler form of html is saved when compiling to wxWidgets Help to work around the lack of support for inline CSS Styles.
• When initially displaying the help file, the fonts may be too small, depending on your screen, so you may need to increase the font size in the Help Viewer to 12 points. You can do this by clicking the [A] button on the far right of the toolbar and then selecting the font size.
• Links to external websites and e-mail links do not work in wxWidgets Help.
• Animated GIFs are not supported.
• Expandable Paragraphs and Popups are also not supported, because they use JavaScript.

You can find out more about wxWidgets from www.wxWidgets.org.

You can also download a HelpViewer for different platforms, written by Anthemion Software, from the links below: