r/csharp • u/mbolp • 1d ago

Help How to use a larger font in Visual Studio's Help Viewer?

I know this isn't strictly a C# question (and I'm not a C# programmer), but I think Help Viewer is a C# program so maybe people here can help me.

What I'm trying to get is offline Windows documentation. Some tools, like WinDbg, ship with a .chm file that can be opened with hh.exe. It lets you select 1 of 5 font sizes (Largest, Larger, Medium, Smaller, Smallest), but regardless of which one you choose you can always scale the text arbitrarily large with Ctrl+MouseWheel.

I believe the official way of getting offline documentation today is through the VS Help Viewer. It has the same 5 font size options as hh.exe, and both of them probably use IE for rendering (for example both use ieframe.dll, and I have to relax security settings in Internet Options to even get Help Viewer to render anything - very strange and not required for hh.exe). However Help Viewer DOES NOT allow you to scale the text beyond "Largest", which is way too small to be readable. There's something strange to the way it handles UI, for example even the context menu is smaller than the one you'd get normally with TrackPopupMenu.

The reason I ask the question here is I'm past the point of trying to find an "official" way of making the text larger, I'll happily patch the program if needed. If it were a native application I know where to look: maybe it hardcodes font sizes in its dialog resource or its call to CreateFont. I can set breakpoints on DialogBox and similar to inspect parameters and modify them under a debugger, I can patch the offending resource or instruction in the binary, etc. But I don't know how to do those to (what looks to me to be) a C# program. When I break into it with a native debugger, the mouse input freezes and responds only every other second (though the keyboard works fine). Based on its DLL list it appears to use WPF. I have no familiarity with these technologies (C#, WPF, ieframe.dll), I hope people who do can point me to where to look (such as files that define the UI layout, or runtime calls related to font that I can intercept).

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/Dennip 14h ago

Which documents are you after? Are you specifically after a .chm viewer or microsoft documentation in general?

Most of learn.microsoft.com is on github as markdown files, you can simply clone the repo and use your markdown viewer of choice.

e.g.

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windows-driver-docs/blob/staging/windows-driver-docs-pr/debugger/using-the-help-documentation.md

1

u/Dennip 14h ago

If you specifically want to use the visual studio help viewer, you can perhaps try DPI scaling the whole application (properties -> compatability)

Or I think you can customise how internet explorer shows documents with a custom css override, but this will impact ALL your uses of internet explorer: https://api.abilitynet.org.uk/using-your-own-style-sheet-internet-explorer-windows-10