# How to customize Help for the Web Mapping Application

This page explains how to customize the Help for the Web Mapping Application. This page is not intended for viewing by the end users of your application. You may wish to move this file to a location not accessible to users, or delete it.

The Help uses standard client-side Web tools: HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and a small amount of JavaScript. You should be familiar with basic HTML and CSS to customize this Help. No server-side technology is used within this Help. The Help is simple uncompiled Help, with a set of web pages, images and related files.

#### Tips for customizing Help

- Use any editor to modify the Help. You can use a plain text editor, such as Notepad, or an HTML editor, such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.
- All Help files are contained within the Help folder. The images sub-folder contains some of the images used in the Help. Other images are referenced from the parent Web Mapping Application, or from a web resource location. If you plan to deploy this Help separately from your Web Mapping Application, see the discussion below on images.
- The default.htm page contains links to individual help pages. If you add a new page to your Help, add a link here so your users can find it. If you delete a help file, remove its link as well.
- Many properties for display of elements are set up as styles, using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Most styles are contained in a single file, StyleSheet.css. This CSS file is used in each Help file (see the <link> near the top of each file).
- If you change a style in the StyleSheet.css, it will take effect in every Help page. For example, to change the background color of every help file, change the background-color property in the body style, which is at the top of the StyleSheet.css file.
- For tips on using styles and HTML, see a book or website on the topic, such as W3 Schools.
- A header is placed at the top of Help pages, which shows "Back" and "Help topics" links. This header is inserted using JavaScript. The JavaScript is stored in the HelpFunctions.js file. You can modify the links by modifying the writeHeader() function in this file.

#### Image issues when deploying Help separately from the Web Mapping Application

Some images are used from the images folder in the Web Mapping Application, in the parent folder of Help. These images may not display correctly if the Help is moved to a folder outside the Web Mapping Application.

If you must locate the Help separately from the Web Mapping Application, you will need to add these images to your customized Help website.

1. Copy images referenced from the images folder of the parent Web Mapping Application into your Help website. You can find these images by searching for "../images/" in the files of the Help website. They include zoom-in_off.gif, fullextent.gif, and measure-line.png, and total about 24 references in various page of the Help. Copy each image from the parent images directory into the images subdirectory inside Help.
2. Then update the URLs for each image to point to your local copy of the image. Find each reference to "../images/", and change them to "images/".
3. After copying the images and updating the URLs, test each Help page to ensure images appear.