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Thread: [VB6] A Little Help For You

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  1. #1

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    [VB6] A Little Help For You

    One of the small things that can be a big help to users is to add online Help to your programs. But often the effort required is far out of scale with the rest of the program itself, and only a few paragraphs or pages of text are really needed.

    One old standby is to make a simple Help Form that isn't very much more than an About box with a multiline TextBox. While this is cheap and easy you can do a lot more with a RichTextBox using colors, varying fonts and sizes, paragraph indenting, bullets, etc.

    The downside of this is the need to deploy the OCX it requires. Even if you aren't one of those "no dependencies" extremists this can be one more nuisance for things like tiny utility programs or "portable" applications.


    There is an alternative though. You can use the Windows RichEdit control directly.

    This can be a lot of work if you need a full-featured RTB, but just to place one on the client area of a Form and load some read-only text into it is pretty simple.


    The attached demo consists of HelpForm.frm, a dummy sample RTF "documentation" file to be embedded as a resource, and a simple project to wrap it as a demo.

    You can create your RTF Help file using WordPad, which supports pretty much everything RichEdit 1.0 does. I chose the oldest RichEdit version here because it should allow the Form to work all the way back to Windows 95 without any deployable dependencies.


    Using it in your own Projects is easy. Just create your RTF documentation, add it using VB6's Resource Editor, and include HelpForm.frm in your Project. Then Show the form via a Help menu option or button in your application.

    Go ahead and compile the sample project to see how small this can be!

    Tested on XP SP3, Vista SP2, and Windows 7 RC. I don't have a Win95 VM built right now so maybe one of you can test it there and post the results too?
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  2. #2
    Hyperactive Member Ram2Curious's Avatar
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    Re: [VB6] A Little Help For You

    Not tested yet but looks good dilettante

  3. #3

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    Re: [VB6] A Little Help For You

    Thanks!

    Ignore the silly sample text, I just threw a small example together quickly.

  4. #4
    PowerPoster Nightwalker83's Avatar
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    Re: [VB6] A Little Help For You

    Cool! I have always used a text-box to display the help by copying and pasting the document inside. Now this method appears to be much better.
    when you quote a post could you please do it via the "Reply With Quote" button or if it multiple post click the "''+" button then "Reply With Quote" button.
    If this thread is finished with please mark it "Resolved" by selecting "Mark thread resolved" from the "Thread tools" drop-down menu.
    https://get.cryptobrowser.site/30/4111672

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