Today the IT-industry has widely spread into our lives. Usage of multiple programs and operating systems became an essential part of work. But dealing with such amount of tools requires knowledge of correct techniques to use them, so the necessity of help-making (help-authoring) tools - HAT - is obvious.
The general sequency for long-life projects' helpfiles is the following: from .doc (.rtf) through .hlp to .chm for win32 applications OR (another branch) browser-based help and OmniHelp.
The CHM (html-help) format introduced by Microsoft Corporation seems to provide the best search capabilities, is easy to use; besides, the compression algorithms are used there to decrease file size; external objects may be embedded into the help file; cross-references are possible between different chm files.
The initial tool of chm production is MS HTML Help Workshop, a bit ascetic and rather complex (mean many options are hidden) to use. That leaded to development of WYSIWYG programs for help authoring.
Currently there's only one objection in the world of WYSIWYG HATs: pricing policy. The question is: Why do we need to pay for a UI to html-help workshop (yes, all programs use it (!)), and pay more than $150 - 200 (some tools feel like requiring up to $ 1000) for their work).
An exploration has been made, standing out answers for 2 questions:
1. What possibilities does the tool provide?
2. What percent of them shall we use?
To explain the second statement, you do not need a heavy-car when you have a car capable of transfering the necessary goods. In this case you do not need a "inosaurus" in help-authoring when you plan to create a help file which should be quite light and would work on most systems it is desired to work on.
Provided statements make the exploration process more concrete: let us define the cost-efficiency of a HAT (say approx. $100) and a variety of output options (should be html-help, Winhelp, RTF, browser-based help, OmniHelp, pdf).
The following tools are to be closely inspected:
- EC Software Help & Manual
- Macromedia RoboHelp
- CS One Doc-To-Help
- Shalom HelpMaker
- Helpware FAR
- JGSoftware HelpScribble
- Vizacc HelpMaker.NET
- Anet HelpTool.
(to be continued...)[/list]
