On another thread
http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=17770&b=1
someone asked me how to launch the windows help file from DarkBasic Pro. I said it wasn't possible. I was wrong.
This may be old news to you guys, but I was poking around and found a file in the EditorFrontend folder called weblinks.cfg. It contains the following:
Dark BASIC Professional Home|http://www.darkbasicpro.com
Dark Basic Developer Network|http://www.darkbasic.com/dbdn
Dark Basic Software Home|http://www.darkbasic.com
I did some experimenting and you can add your own lines to this file and they will be displayed under the Help menu. If you add blank lines then a blank line is added to separate them in the menu. I have tested up to 17 so far. You can easily but a link to any url there.
My next step was to try to get it to launch the windows based help file that I created. I tried using the syntax:
DB Pro Help Windows style|file:///f:/darkbasicpro/help/dbp.chm
"file:f:///" is valid URL syntax, but DBPro won't launch the chm file that way. I tried using the full path to hh.exe (windows help) and passing the chm as a parm. It didn't like the syntax of it, but it did give me an error that showed it was trying to run hh.exe. I then wrote a program that launches the dbp.chm called LaunchHelp.exe and the following syntax worked.
DB Pro Help Windows style|file:///f:/darkbasicpro/help/launchhelp.exe
of course you would need to replace the f:/darkbasicpro with the actual location of your install.
So if anyone is interested in doing this you can get the LaunchHelp here:
http://gamedev.bruceatkinson.com/download/launchhelp.zip
This technique can be used to launch any web page from within DarkBasic Pro.
Update: I've learned that it is fussy about what EXE you load. I'm looking into a way to launch any EXE. It seems it only like's EXE's that don't open windows. The LaunchHelp exe doesn't have a window and it uses WinExecute to shell the help file.
Bruce
