Help Project Files

This reference documents the files included in Microsoft Help 2 projects and resulting compiled Help (.HxS) files. In particular, this reference focuses on the format and structure of author-generated files (input), instead of those generated by the Help compiler (output).

The information in this reference is intended for Help authors who want to manually create or edit Help project files, and for Help developers who want to write applications that can create and edit these file types.

The following table shows the project files, whether they are input or output files, and if they have an equivalent file type in HTML Help 1.x.

File type	Input/output	1.x equivalent
CHM-to-Namespace Map File	Input	None
Attribute Definition (.Hxa) File	Input	None
Collection Definition (.Hxc) File	Input	.hhp
HxMerge Project (.Hxm) File	Input	None
Include (.Hxf) File	Input	None
Index (.Hxk) File	Input	.hhk
Table of Contents (.Hxt) File	Input	.hhc
Sample Definition (.Hxe) File	Input	.hhs
Virtual Topic Definition (.Hxv) File	Input	None
Compiled Help (.HxS)	Output	.chm
Compiled Help index (.HxI)	Output	.chi
Merged index (.HxW)	Output	None
Merged query (.HxQ)	Output	None
Combined attribute index (.HxR)	Output	None
Merged TOC (.HxH)	Output	None
Registered namespace list (.HxL)	Output	None

Note

The new file name extensions for Microsoft Help 2 are not compatible with earlier versions of Help.

In adherence to the XML 1.0 specification, the tags and attributes defined in these files are case-sensitive.

If you author XML using an ANSI encoding, make sure that the encoding matches the current default locale identifier (LCID) of the operating system when the file is created. Failure to do this could cause a mismatch between the encoding specified in your XML file and the actual encoding of the file.

See Also

Concepts

Viewing the DTDs

Other Resources

Help XML Reference