Help Authoring

[mike_gaitens]

I?m hoping for ?getting started? advice on adding user help to my VF-windows application. I know the VF kit contains WinHelp (versatile but hard to learn and maintain?) and HtmlHelp (requires classes/objects and untranslated structures?). Which to choose? There are 3rd-party tools, e.g., RoboHelp, ComponentOne Doc-to-Help, etc. Any recommendations for/against any such tool for use with VF? (Ideally, I?d provide two levels of help, introductory and advanced, and let my users choose which to display.) Thanks for sharing your experience.

[gfthomas8]

I'd recommend that you forget about WinHelp and use the HTML Help workshop available for free from MS. Its simple to use. The commercial help tools are costly and fine if all you do is help author. I read somewhere recently that MS is discontinuing development for HTML Help to be replaced by who knows what.

HTH,
Gerry T.

[Intel_C_Intel]

I agree, the (free) help workshop is the best. Use your favorite HTML editor to author the pages themselves (we use 1st Page 2000, also free). RoboHelp is flaky and the WYSIWYG editor produces the most horrendously bloated HTML (it tends to do things like putting the same tag on every single line etc.)

[Jugoslav_Dujic]

I'd second that. We currently develop help for our application in FrontPage, compile it in HTMLHelp Workshop(which has lame user interface but works fine), publish it to www as such, and insert it to Word document as links to create pdf and doc version. Pretty neat.

You can find Fortran translation of HtmlHelp header here.

[mike_gaitens]

Thanks Jugoslav, that's what I needed to know. And special thanks for the HtmlHelp headers. You've got a great website.