Shareware help tools: suggestions?

[Alexander Von_obert <avobert -at- TWH -dot- MSN -dot- SUB -dot- ORG>]

Hello Cathy,

* Antwort auf eine Nachricht von Cathy Quinones  an All am 11.01.96

CQ> From: Cathy Quinones <quinones -at- mindspring -dot- com>

you should ask this question in the Winhelp newsgroup, but a short note could
 be interesting here, too:

CQ> My question, however, is about shareware documentation tools:
CQ> can you experienced folks recommend any programs?

A quite nice program is Visual Help (Demo VP.ZIP on CICA and other servers,
 compiles three topics only). It costs some $50, is quite limited in
 formatting but easy to use and has some nice features like automatic contens
 page creation a switch to insert the topic IDs into the search word list.

I use it professionally for one special quick'n dirty job: Create dummy help
 systems early in the developement cycle. As soon as I have agreed with the
 programmers on the topic IDs and their values, I take their "header file"
 (ASCII file with a "#define <topic ID> <value>" in every line) and convert it
 to a help system. Each topic contains only a single line of text: the topic ID

This help system serves two purposes:

- The programmers can test their help functions
- I can see where which topic ID is called.

Afterwards you can edit the RTF file with Winword to make the help system
 pretty. But if you do, you have a hard time to return to Visual Help for
 maintenance.


Greetings from Germany,
Alexander

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