Help Builder
No Assistance to a Customer
Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar based on your email address. No Assistance to a Customer
  Mountaga Draba
  All
  Jul 12, 2026 @ 05:07am

Hello, I am sorry to see that you are not responding to my requests regarding mastery of your software mentioned above. For Demonstration Monster, I can understand. But for West Wind Help Builder, I paid for it, so I have the right to be able to use it fully. That the .chm files are outdated (if I had known, I would not have bought it), I asked for assistance so I can generate the .html file as available with the option: Build Html Files For Web Only. Or else tell me where I can get a user guide, and then I will leave it alone. Thank you.

Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar based on your email address. re: No Assistance to a Customer
  Rick Strahl
  Mountaga Draba
  Jul 13, 2026 @ 03:40pm

The documentation is online here:

And here are specific topics that talk about the Html output generation:

Html is Help Builder's native output, so there's nothing special to do - it always creates a Web site as output even when building CHM or other output files. There are options that help you copy the content to a Web site via FTP, ZIp file or file copy.

As to how you hook up your help to your app - I already gave you an idea on how to do this. FoxPro internally only works with CHM files using Topic Ids, CHM files, so unless you use CHM there's not a lot you can do with the native built-in help system beyond that other than intercept the help requests and route them to the appropriate Web site links of a hosted documentation site. None of this is standard and you have to figure out how to hook that up to your app on your own. You can use ShellExecute() to navigate to topics on the Web - this is what I do in every app of mine for help operation. Hook up ON KEY F1 or the Help event and based on where you are navigate to the Web topic. It's not difficult to do.

The process is the same regardless of which tool you use - both Help Builder and Doc Monster use the same basic concept of generating a Web site as output, a site that can be published and hosted on a Web server or any static service (lots of free options for that including GitHub Pages).

Hello, I am sorry to see that you are not responding to my requests regarding mastery of your software mentioned above.

I have spent a bunch of time responding to you, and all you do is respond with "it doesn't work" without giving any idea of what doesn't work. If you have a real actionable questions with something that can be followed up I'm happy to reply, but if you give me nothing you get nothing back...

Help Builder has been marked for deprecation for quite some time and it clearly states so on the product page - the product is no longer listed in any of our product lists and the domain now redirects to Documentation Monster's. You can still direct navigate to the product page, but it takes some effort to find it. I think that was already the case when you purchased it in May...

+++ Rick ---

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