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 |
|---|---|---|
Input |
None |
|
Input |
None |
|
Input |
.hhp |
|
Input |
None |
|
Input |
None |
|
Input |
.hhk |
|
Input |
.hhc |
|
Input |
.hhs |
|
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.