More Advanced Procedures > Using Baggage Files

Help & Manual 4 introduces a new function called Baggage, which enables you to add a collection of small, frequently-used files to your project. Baggage files are not references, they become a physical part of your project. They are stored in your .HMX project file and they are always accessible, even if you delete the original source files.

What are Baggage files for?

Baggage files have two purposes:

Integrating files referenced in HTML code and scripts:

There are a number of functions in Help & Manual that allow you to insert your own inline HTML code in your output or to modify the HTML code generated by the program. These include Insert > Plain HTML Code, the HTML code editing function in Insert > Movie, all the HTML editing functions for HTML templates and the code you enter in scripts and macros.

If you reference external files in this code the compiler used to generate your output does not know anything about them. To solve this problem in earlier versions of the program you had to manually add [FILES] references to the Extended .HHP settings for HTML Help and remember to manually copy your referenced files to your output directories for Browser-based Help.

Baggage provides a quick and elegant way of solving this problem. All files that you add to your project as Baggage are embedded in your .HMX project file and automatically made available to the compiler when you generate your output.

Quick access to frequently-used graphics:

If your Baggage files include graphics files you can display them as shortcuts with thumbnail images in the drop-down list in the Toolbar.

Baggage files should not generally be used for this purpose, however, because graphics files tend to be large and using more than a couple will bloat your project file. It is much more efficient to use the picture shortcuts feature, which adds graphics files to the drop-down list without embedding them in your project file.