Re: Has anyone ever hear of an .shg file?

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM>]

Jeff Hooker wrote:

>I've inherited a large on-line help system chock full of .shg files
>(some variation of bitmap, it appears) that I'd like to pull into an
>image-editing program and update. The hitch: none of my graphics
>programs have ever heard of a .shg file and neither have I.

What you have are segmented hyperlink graphics files. Each of your
.shg images contains one or more hotspots that allow you to jump
to other topics within the help file (similar to image maps on
web pages).

The editor that you use to create or edit these files is shed.exe.
Your help authoring tool probably supplies a version of this file.
Microsoft development languages also come with a version.

To create a .shg, you open a bitmap in shed.exe, define hotspots
using the mouse, then assign a topic ID as the link destination.
To edit a .shg, create the new screenshot (or whatever) and copy
it to the clipboard, open the old .shg file in shed.exe, and select
Edit > Replace from the menu. The graphic on the clipboard replaces
the old graphic. Then you can drag and reshape your hotspots to
conform to the outlines of the new image.

You may notice some .shg files without hotspots and wonder why
they're there. Generally, .shg files are smaller than .bmp files,
so it may have been done to save space. Additionally, .shg files
don't suffer from resolution problems as they migrate to different
size monitors, so sometimes they're used to eliminate the need
for multi-resolution bitmaps (.mrb files).

Hope that's enough to get you started!


-Sue Gallagher               http://pw1.netcom.com/~gscale/susanwg/
sgallagher -at- expersoft -dot- com     http://www.expersoft.com

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