Help file authoring

Question

Hi.

I would appreciate some suggestions about Help File Authoring (Win32).

I know how to use an existing help file, .chm or .hlp from C# or Delphi or whatever. Problem is, there's always someone else who have been nice enough to provide me with these files :)

Now, where do I begin?

I've been trying out HelpScribble, it works, but I find it somewhat lacking and I might as well be using TeX to render my helpfiles. Microsoft HTML Workshop is a bit crude. Searching for other tools returns too many results.

How do you guys do? Manual HTML editing using Vim / Dreamweaver. Any best practises?

Answer 1

I used adobe robohelp in a project two month ago. I think it provide good results.

I recommend it to you.

Answer 2

I have used robohelp for years.

It is fine, but the support and upgrade path is messed up. The core technology is also very dated.

We are moving to madcap flare http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/robohelp.aspx

Answer 3

We use DocBook as our underlying help format. It's essentially a subset of XML designed for creating documentation. We use Syntext Serna as our XML editor as it has support for WYSIWYG and inline editing of XML #includes.

The great advantage advantage of using Docbook is that it can be transformed into other formats using XSL templates provided by the Docbook project. We can get from Docbook to HTML, HTMLHelp, and PDF (via XML-FO). Transforming to the XML-based MS word formats is also theoretically possible.

Getting from Docbook format to a chm file is as simple as:

1. Run the HTML-Help XSL templates on the XML source using eg XSLTproc
2. Compile the output HTML files using Microsoft's HTML Help Compiler (HHC).