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The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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.ref [string], [string], ...
 
The topics specified by the .ref command will appear in the QuickHelp
References menu. When QuickHelp is run under MS OS/2, the topics will be
preloaded while the user is viewing the current topic.
 
The .ref command is followed by a space and any number of topic names,
separated by commas. The line may not exceed 250 characters. Each topic name
will appear in the References menu. A maximum of 21 topic names may be used.
Any additional topic names are ignored. You may have any number of .ref
lines so long as the total number of topic names does not exceed 21.
 
You should use care in choosing how many references to place in a topic.
When a topic is first displayed, QuickHelp starts a thread which preloads
every topic found in the .ref lines. If the topics are large, memory may
have to be swapped in order to gain sufficient memory to hold the referenced
topics.
 
Note:  When the helpmake program is creating the database, it allows a .ref
       line to exceed 76 characters. All other command lines and text must
       not exceed 76 characters. A .ref line must not exceed 250
       characters.
 
The .ref command may also be used without any text on the same line. In this
case, all following lines until the first blank line will be processed as
references, and their names placed into the References menu. This would be
used when you want the reference to be displayed as part of the topic, as
well as placing it into the References menu. The references may also include
cross-references. In this case, QuickHelp will display the name in the
References menu, but use the cross-reference as the topic to search when the
user selects the name in the References menu.
 
Example
 
In the following example, QuickHelp will place the topic names WinAvailMem
and WinCreateHeap in the Reference menu when the WinAllocMem topic is
displayed:
 
    .context WinAllocMem
    \bSee Also\b
 
    .ref
    %WinAvailMem%, %WinCreateHeap%
 
.category, .context, .freeze, .list, .paste, .popup, .topic
 
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