RE: Help in Evaluating HATs

["B.R. Burnside" <burnside -dot- br -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi,

I am a very satisfied user of H&M and just to give you some more info,
according to the company, if the new docx  (microsoft xml) format goes
well, they will probably adopt this as an import/export format as
opposed to rtf now (which is simply because the proprietary nature of
.doc files)

also, I've done some modular files and it worked okay for my needs.

Finally, automatic indexing is limited (okay, nearly non-existant) but
I find that in the end you have to buck up and do it by hand anyway.

Best Regards,

B. Ramsey Burnside
burnside -dot- br -at- gmail -dot- com


-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+pauln=helpauthors -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+pauln=helpauthors -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Klaus Nji
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 12:24 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Help in Evaluating HATs

I've been reviewing several HATs for our company.  All of our documents
are currently in Word, which are then converted to PDF, a very painful
process.

Before setting out to look for a HAT, we specified our minimum
requirements as follows:

- Tool should take Word files as input with little modification required
on the final content.
- Output formats required:  CHM and PDF, at a minimum.
- There should be support for conditional output, at the text level. We
should be able to control output text based by manipulating certain
variables or attributes.
-  Automation of the ouput building process should be supported.  It
should be possible to write some kind of batch file, which will run
every night to produce the output.
- One shoule be able to customize the PDF output.  At a minimum, the PDF
should have compressed bookmarks.
- Support for Modular Help, where by smaller books can be amalgamated
into bigger books.
- Provision for automatic indexing.
- Seamless acceptance of very large Word documents.
- Good editor.
- Active online user forum.

So far, we have looked at:

- Help & Manual (H&M)
- RoboHelp Office (RH)
- DocToHelp (D2H)
- AuthorIT  (AIT)

Our opinion is as follows:

Help & Manual seems to satisfy almost all of the requirements.  However,
there are some unanswered questions:
- It seems to have limited support for automatic indexing and modular
help.

- Word documents must be in .rtf format.
- Output from imported Word documents lose all original links.  A pain
to correct.
We liked the intuitive and user friendly interface H&M offerered.  Most
impressive was its flexible support for conditional text.

RoboHelp Office is very good as well but also had some limitations:
- Conditional text is restricted to the inclusiion and exclusion of
text.
- Automating builds does not seem to be supported, or is not well
documented.
- Importing large Word documents and creating PDFs seems clumsy.  Heck,
I have not yet been able to successfully create a PDF document.
- Uncertainty about what Adobe will do with this product.
- Relatively quiet user forum.

DocToHelp has a very good interface but like the others has its
limitations:
- Editing source to making a change in a project variable requires one
to open and close Word.  This is not very good.
- Modular Help is not supported for printed documents.
- PDF output generation is new and offers very little flexibility.
- Relatively quiet user forum.

So, we are leaning towards D2H or H&M.

What has your experiences been with each product?

Thanks in advance.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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Create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to Help file formats or 
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