Using PHP Manual CHM Edition

When you double click on a CHM, a HTML Help Viewer window opens with three panes. On the left side of the window is the Navigation pane. It contains four navigational tabs: the Contents, Index, Search and Favorites tabs. On the right side of the window is the Topic pane. It displays the selected help topic, or the default help topic on startup. The help pages are all separate HTML files, your Internet Explorer displays the pages in the Topic pane. The third pane is the toolbar, which is located below the help window title bar. You can adjust the horizontal layout with dragging the vertical border between the Navigation pane and the Topic pane.

Note, that when you open the CHM the first time, it may appear in a strange position and size. From then, Windows remembers the window position, size and the last opened tab. All these including your favorites are stored in a file named hh.dat. If you move your file to another directory, all these remembered settings will be lost (including your favorites listing!). If you replace your CHM file with a new one, with the same name, this is not a problem though. The file names and path values are stored in hh.dat.

The HTML Help Toolbar

The HTML Help Toolbar contains the following icons, when you view the PHP Manual:

• Hide/Show - Hides/shows the navigation pane.
• Locate - Locates a topic in the contents tab (in case you reached a topic with search, index or favorites, and would like to see where it is in the table of contents tree view).
• Back - Goes back in the history.
• Forward - Goes forward in the history.
• Refresh - Reloads the current page.
• Home - Opens the startup page of the CHM.
• Print - Opens the print dialog box.
• Options - Provides a dropdown with more options.

Using this toolbar is really easy, many of the toolbar icons are strongly related to their Internet Explorer equivalents.

The Navigation Pane

The Navigation Pane contains four navigational tabs: the Contents, Index, Search and Favorites tabs. These all provide different methods to access a topic in the help file.

• The contents tab reveals a tree like table of contents, where you can navigate to the desired topic by opening and closing parts of the tree. You can even access the deepest sections using this TOC. If you right click on an item here and choose "Print...", you'll have the option to print the selected topic or the selected topic and all subtopics. However printing is not the initial goal of this representation of the manual (the PDF version is suitable for printing).
• The index tab lists a huge number of "keywords" (actually manual page titles). You can pick one, or start to type a keyword, see the list adjusting to your input, and then click on a topic, or press enter if the selected topic is the one you would like to see.
• The search tab shows one of the most powerful features of the HTML Help Viewer, the full text search (also known as FTS). Here you can type in your search expression, optionally connecting words with AND/OR/NEAR/NOT. Before you click 'List topics', you can also set some options at the bottom. After the search results are displayed, you'll realize that manual text and user note results are separated. To sort out the two types, click on the 'Location' column header. Now from the search results list, you can pick a topic, and see it's page. The keywords you searched for are highlighted on the page.
• The favorites tab enables you to store your most used topics in a list, easily accessible. Here you can see the list, add the current topic to it, remove one, or display a selected item. You can also specify your own title for the favorite, by typing it into the 'Current topic:' box. The user note page titles are prepended with a 'N:' string so you can distinguish them from normal manual pages in the favorites listing.

Keyboard Shortcuts

There are many keyboard shortcuts you can use to increase your productivity. Many users find it more appropriate to use these keyboard shortcuts to access topics, instead of clicking.