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Link Colors and Appearance

By default, links use the color blue and underline. You can change this, as with many other appearance and formatting style attributes, by modifying the Help target template used by Doc-To-Help. These templates are installed by Doc-To-Help in the Microsoft Word template directory (to locate that directory, use Word menu Tools|Options|File Locations|User Templates).

To see what template is used in building a help target, select the target in the Doc-To-Help project and look at the value of the Template property in the Help Targets property pane. For example, to modify the color or other appearance attributes of the links using the Link Class style in HTML Help, open the C1H_dotnet_html.dot template in Microsoft Word, find the Link Class style and modify it. You can do this with any style in any help target template. Here is the list of standard Documenter for .NET target templates for different targets:

      C1H_dotnet_hlp.dot – WinHelp target

      C1H_dotnet_prn.dot – Manual target

      C1H_dotnet_html.dot – HTML-based targets (HTML Help, HTML, Help 2.0, JavaHelp)

Blue underlined links are an MSDN standard, so it was chosen as default in Documenter for .NET. But you can change the colors as described above, or you can make links look like standard links in the corresponding target. To use the standard link appearance instead of the one specified by styles in target templates, set the AffectsAppearance property of the link styles to False. You can locate that property in Doc-To-Help on the Project icon properties pane.

For HTML-based targets viewed with Internet Explorer (or standalone Microsoft viewers, such as Help 2.0 or HTML Help), standard link colors are determined in Internet Explorer settings Internet Options|General|Colors|Links. For WinHelp, the standard link color is green with an underline.