I am trying to find an open source indexed help file for a site I am working on. I've been looking at documentation for RoboHelp and that comes really close to what I'm interested in using. Does anyone have any good information on some nice free tools to accomplish this?
I would like to be able to import a given file with comments and such and have them indexed according to their title or subject.
I like Sphinx.
You write your documentation using a plain text markup format, reStructuredText. Sphinx can generate a table of contents from your documentation's structure. You can specify words for the index, and full-text search is automatically generated for the HTML output.
Sphinx can create HTML, Windows HTML help and PDF (via Latex).
I have created end-user documentation for two projects using Sphinx, and have also used it to document a couple of Python packages (Sphinx has a lot of features around extracting documentation from Python modules, it was originally created to write the Python documentation).
It is very easy to get started, and you get professional-looking documentation with a minimal effort.
If you are used to the WYSIWYG way of text editing, using a plain-text markup format might take some getting used to. But I believe it will be worth the effort.
See also:
I asked a similar question from the developer perspective a few weeks ago and while I don't know how it compares to Robohelp, Sphinx ought to be very suitable to produce end user documentation.
I've looked at most of the free and open source alternatives in this area, and frankly none of them come anywhere near the commercial alternatives. In fact, about the only non-FOSS product I still use (apart from Windows OS itself) is Help & Manual, which I strongly recommend.
Have you considered a Wiki?
The biggest problem which you will want to avoid is that the barriers to maintaining the system is too difficult: if someone makes a change to some feature, but then has to load up some program, write some HTML, recompile, etc, it's more likely they'll just let that feature go undocumented.