ITauthor

If you're in the UK and you write create HTML Help (i.e. .chm files) you might have noticed that your Related Topics links display in a big clumsy dialog box instead of a neat little popup.

This is thanks to a stunning piece of incompetence on Microsoft’s part. They managed to break the hhctrl.ocx Active X file that controls the related topics popups. After about version 4.7 of this file, related topics always appear in a dialog box unless the language of your project is set to US English.

The workaround for RoboHelp is to open the .hhp file in a text editor (e.g. UltraEdit) and make sure the Language is set as follows in the [OPTIONS] section of the file:

Language=0x409 English (United States)

The chances are there won’t be a Language setting, in which case just add this. Save the file and, when you next compile the project, the related topics are displayed as popups.

If you've imported your RoboHelp project into Flare, go into Project > Project Settings and make sure the language is set to English (United States), then recompile the .chm file.