Hi Albert,

I have no straightforward answer to this complex question. But in the apps I currently handle we make the distinction clear between tooltips and what we call "data tips".
1- "Tooltips" apply to exclusively to tool description, are short text-based descriptions and vfp or win-api tooltiping will do the job fine,
2- "data tips" are visual clues about the info contained, not the tooling required to access the said information. They should be bigger than plain tooltiping and more insightful. They are quite useful ie "insight-ful" on data grids, long text controls or images such as maps or or interactive business plots. Basically all heavily loaded widgets... Current windows platform tooltips are possibly not the best way to convey this content-related info!

Over the past few years we used various tricks for those data tips. But we found no perfect solution in the limited and dated vfp Ui arsenal.

I currently deliver them as a floating picture control filled with an image built on the fly via external APIs. Not a perfect solution and a lot of extra work! Too much of it. But that allows us to deliver vivid image-based and/or colored content. No substitute for smarter solution that chrome or recent dotnet-based solutions would allow. But although finding the adequate "x-y placement" of the "data tip" on screen issues an issue, this does the trick!

I hope that I am clear enough and that it helps!

Daniel