Re: Help in Evaluating HATs

Subject: Re: Help in Evaluating HATs
From: Klaus Nji <makaveli_0000 -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:06:51 -0800 (PST)

Help and Manual is definitely a good product. However, our concerns with H&M is the requirement for .rtf inputs. We have over 50+ .doc documents and some are over 9M in size. Conversion to .rtf, although a finite amount of work, will change the dynamics of how our documents are being generated.

We would rather have Word as a processor.

Also, H&M does not seem to import large documents fairly well. Maybe it is a machine problem but this is the impression I am getting this far.

What about its support for multiple user's? Looks like each user would have to checkout an entire file to work on it.

----- Original Message ----
From: Jessica Weissman <Jessica -dot- Weissman -at- hillcrestlabs -dot- com>
To: Klaus Nji <makaveli_0000 -at- yahoo -dot- com>; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 9:02:21 AM
Subject: RE: Help in Evaluating HATs

I had a large API doc in Word format. It was beautiful and elegant and
made good use of Word styles and all that, but the developers wanted
something more easily searchable.

After evaluating several tools I ended up with Help & Manual. We output
as an e-book and as PDFs.

I had to do some major massaging after importing to H & M, since certain
things didn't import quite as I wanted them to. Our product name
includes a Unicode character, which did not import correctly, for
example. But it needed to be done only once.

Both the e-book and PDF output look nice enough and work well for our
use. I now edit directly in H & M, using conditional text where it
makes sense. Ultimately, when our API forks into several versions,
we'll be able to handle that easily via H & M.

After I got over my attachment to serial figure numbering for the
printed (PDF) version, I was very happy with the PDF output. The serial
figure numbers weren't really necessary, though they showed off my
amazing achievement in understanding and apply Word cross-referencing.
Somehow that didn't seem as important as having multiple format output
and conditional text.

H & M even supports two flavors of PDF, one optimized for printing and
one for reading on the screen. This means I can use active links
online, but avoid the link-related highlighting in the printed version,
for example.

Support is superb, with a forum that is actively monitored by the
developers and support staff. I've had few problems that didn't yield
to a search of the forum posts, and those (except for a few limitations
of H & M) got resolved quickly when I asked about them in the forum.

One caveat: the help file does not always reflect the latest version
(4.2), but seems up to date with version 4.

Also, you can use more text variables in layouts than the ones they let
you input from the list.

You can count me a very satisfied user. The product fits my needs.

Jessica Weissman




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Create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to Help file formats or
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Web-based technology, and PDF output. http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList

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