Tin Mann & WinBoard/XBoard

[Eric Mullins]

Indeed, building the help file requires the MicroSoft Help Studio to be on your system, and for most people, it is not. The kind of.hlp files it builds do not work in Vista anyway, unless you load additional software. Quoting out the lines wil prevent the error, but no .hlp file will be built. Another way would be to copy the winboard.hlp from another WinBoard there.

Now...For me anyway to compile to an executable file requires me to put a .hlp file in the winboard directory where the source codes are (I just used a copy of the original winboard hlp file I had in my Winboard programs folder) and to comment out the lines noted in a post above.

make (and nmake for MSVC) will check the timestamps of the .hlp file and the parts required to build it. It will still try to rebuild the .hlp file if it is older than the .rtf file used to generate it. For a temporary solution, just 'touch winboard.hlp' prior to running make.

So, this is just a packaging issue that is easily resolved by making sure to include the .hlp file in the source tree, taking care to make sure it is newer than the .rtf file so the rule won't be invoked.

[Charles Browne]

make (and nmake for MSVC) will check the timestamps of the .hlp file and the parts required to build it. It will still try to rebuild the .hlp file if it is older than the .rtf file used to generate it.

So, this is just a packaging issue that is easily resolved by making sure to include the .hlp file in the source tree, taking care to make sure it is newer than the .rtf file so the rule won't be invoked.

o.k., I will bow to your knowledge.

This is in no way directed to you Eric.

I must apologize for my turning part of this Tim Mann & WinBoard/XBoard thread into a compiling Winboard one. I thought my posting my first post in this thread might potentially interrupt the intended and subsequent thread topic flow - but I was hoping it would not lead to that. I should have posted my problem in the WinBoard development and bugfixing subforum.

[H.G.Muller]

I was browsing for the help workshop, and I noticed that MicroSoft also has a "HTML Help Workshop" for download. I tried it out, and it was able to import the old help project file with the aid of a wizzard. In the end it produced a file winboard.chm, which I put on my website.

Can anyone try if this file is any good as help file on Vista? I am not sure how the file should be used. Does Vista have a built-in viewer for such files?

[F. Bluemers]

Works ok,just a double click.

[Roger Brown]

Works ok,just a double click.

I confirm this.

[H.G.Muller]

Ah, that is great. So if I can figure out how to call that viewer from WinBoard, the help menu could even be active in Vista.

On the downside: it seems the color of the characters is lost in the conversion; the shown paragraphs were supposed to be in green...

[F.Huber]

So if I can figure out how to call that viewer from WinBoard, the help menu could even be active in Vista.

Well, something like the "ShellExecute" command (with "WinBoard.chm" as parameter) should work - the OS knows itself which program to use for opening a CHM file ...

[Mathieu]

Perhaps a solution to solve the color issue :
instead of importing .hlp file, perhaps you can create the .chm file with the same program (MS help workshop).
CHM is compiled html, so if you have the help sources in .html files, it's realatively easy to create the .chm file.

[H.G.Muller]

Unortunately the help source is an rtf file, not html.

[Mathieu]

I wanted to see if I could help to produce a coloured help file but I had problem with your .chm file :
since it was produced on another computer, my 1st task was to allow it to run on my computer (right-click on the file -> properties-advanced).

1st problem solved. It works, let's go on.

I tried to decompile it to obtain source files and it worked : I obtained htm files and a hhk file (it produces the index).
Unfortunately, the names are too discouraging, being like "winb0nlh.htm" ; "winb1hir.htm" and so on... Not easy to find the corresponding page in the .hlp file to check for the color.
May be it's the name of your rtf files ??
If you confirm, I'm willing to put colors back in the chm files by matching colors between xxx.rtf from source and xxx.htm from my decompile try.

[H.G.Muller]

These strange html files is what the wizzard made that imported the old help project (winboard.hpj) into the HTML Help Workshop. I have no idea if it made them from the winboard.rtf file that was the original source (e.g. one html file per chapter) or if it converted the winboard.hlp file. Booth the source and result of the olde WinHelp were single files.

I posted the rtf file as http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/winrtf.zip .

It might be a lot of work to put the colors back as they were. We must only do it hen we are sure there is no automatic way to do it, e.g. by using smarter options in importing the old project.