Help File Explorer Dialog

The Help File Explorer dialog is available primarily from the Authoring menu in the main window. It allows you to view the contents of a compiled Help File. Either .HxS/.HxI/.HxQ/.HxR files (MS Help 2.x files) or .CHM/.CHI/.CHQ/.CHW/.ITS/HH.DAT files (MS HTML Help 1.x files).

The tree control (left) displays the folders and files contained in the help file. As you click on each tree item its file contents appears on the right side. On the right-side there are several data views available. Click on the page tabs to move between each view.

The embedded IE WebBrowser control ("Formatted" page) cannot view all file types. Some file types we wrap in a temporary text file so we can display it. Other file types trigger the typical Internet Explorer response of the download/save dialog.
Hide the TOC, then open the HH Utilities dialog and this dialog side by side on your screen. You can now double-click items in the Help files page and view the contents in this dialog.
Main Menu
File > Open Open the Chm or HxS file you want to explorer.
File > Reload Reload the current Help file or load a file that was previously loaded.
File > Launch Open the Chm or HxS file in your help viewer. Note that if you open a data file (.HxI/.HxQ etc) then this will probably fail.
File > Exit Close the window.
View > Show Table Of Contents Hide & show the folders & files pane (left).
View > ASCII Dump Page Display yet another view of the data. A raw ASCII dump.
View > Expand All on Open If checked, when a file is opened expand the entire tree control.
Help Displays this help page.
Tree Control

The tree control (left) shows the internal structure of the ITS help file. Click on a tree node/file to view its contents in the right hand pane.

The tree control right-click popup menu contains the following commands:

View Source Opens the selected tree item in the text editor.
Expand All Expand all tree nodes.
Contract All Collapse all tree nodes.
Browser "Formatted" Page

On the Formatted page are the typical browser buttons you find on all browser windows, plus an "Allow Redirect" button.

Allow Redirect Button

Some documents use HTML or Script to automatically redirect themselves to another URL. This redirection is often very fast and undetectable by the eye. Set the Allow Redirect button Down to allow all attempts by the document to change its URL. Set this button Up to block all attempts by the document to change its URL. When redirection occurs and Allow Redirection = Off, a prompt appears across the top of the browser control. Click the prompt to continue on and load the new URL, or ignore the prompt, or close the prompt.

FAR can not always distinguish between URL changes due to clicks on document links, and URL changes due to automatic redirection. If you click links within a document and get blocked then either set the button to the Down state, or click the prompt when it appears to allow the URL change.

WebBrowser

The page contains an embedded MS Web Browser so it has the Internet Explorer right-click menu as well as the Ctrl+F find command.

Expect to see script errors

What we are doing is extracting files from a HxC or HxS file some of which are not meant to be viewed in a normal Web Browser control. In the case of MS Help 2 HxS files we actually have to register the HxS file under a temporary namespace name (FAR.TMP.name) so that links have a half chance of working. Many collections are designed to be registered under a specific Namespace name along with other help files. So remember, you are not in a real help viewer and you can expect to see a few script errors.

"Hex Dump" Page

Simple hexadecimal dump of the data extracted from the help file. There is a right-click menu which allows you to copy to clipboard and view source in a text editor. Use Shift-Click to multi-select items before copying.

"ASCII Dump" Page

Yet another data view. This page can be hidden/shown using the View menu. Displays 80 characters per line. Like the Hex Dump page, all non-displayable ASCII characters are shown as a dot. Has a right-click menu same as the Hex Dump page.

Internal Files

For convenience all HTML Help binary data files (see HH Utilities dialog help)  have been grouped together in a virtual folder (does not actually exist in the Chm or HxS) called "Internal Files". Several of these binary files, marked with a red TOC icon, have been deciphered for you (CHM only), the information extracted and displayed in the "Formatted" page. The other binary data files show nothing of interest in the "Formatted" page. 

Note: This information is not published by Microsoft. It is simply our guess work.


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