BUG: HTML Help--Problems Setting Table of Contents Color

There are several problems that occur when setting the Table of Contents background and foreground colors using the HTML Help workshop:

• When you set different colors for the foreground and background using the Table of Contents Properties/Styles dialog box, both colors in the dialog box are set to the value of the foreground color.
• If you change the background color and then later try to reset the color to white, the color doesn't change to white. If you then view the background color using the dialog box, the background color is black.
• The foreground color is never actually used anywhere.

These problems are due to bugs in the HTML Help workshop.

The workaround is modify the colors by editing the .hhc file with a text editor. Once you save the file, do not change the colors using the HTML Help Workshop.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

To reproduce the problems, follow these steps:

1. Launch the HTML Workshop and open an .hhp file.
2. Set the background color in the Table of Contents Properties/Styles dialog box to anything other than white.
3. Close the dialog box and open it again. Both colors are set to the value of the foreground.
4. Compile the .chm and view it. Note that the background color has changed as expected.
5. Reset the background color in the Table of Contents dialog box to white.
6. Recompile the .chm and view it. Note that the color has not changed to white.
7. Set the foreground color to any color. Recompile the .chm and view it. Note that the foreground color is never used.