Re: Frame Viewer vs. Robohelp

[Grant Hogarth <GRANT -at- ONYXGFX -dot- COM>]

Debbie

Robohelp is a WinHelp Help Authoring Tool (HAT). It requires only
that you have winhelp loaded on your machine. However, (as with all
Winhelp HATs) this means that you can't use it on Macs, UN*X boxes,
or NeXTs without porting.

WHATs all use RTF files. Robo help is good, as is ForeHelp, and
Doc-to-Help.  I use Help Writer's Assistant (HWA), simply beacuse it
has all the features I need (including OS/2 and HTML input/output support),
was significantly less expensive, and is more intuitive (to me) to
use, as it is true WYSISWYG during composition.

Most other HATs require you to have and use MSWord, and you have to
compile the file to see what it looks like. (some do have a preview
function, but it is limited in functionality).

I don't use Frame's rtf function... I just cut and paste into the new
topics, as on-line and paper docs have (IMNSHO) significantly
different issues.

I have written for Frame Viewer, and think it's really neat for
internal docs where everybody has access to FV or FR or FM, but I
don't think it's that good for distribution outside of the techpubs group.
(as an example... I know that there are people out there using it for
company-wide distribution, but they've set up expressly for that.)
I will say that it is nice to be able to have  the reference in a shared central
resource, but you can do the same thing with Help files... it just
takes some planning and forethought.

Grant
==== PLUG: =======
For information on HWA contact:
Olson Software Limited         Internet Mail:stefan -at- olsonsoft -dot- co -dot- nz
Compuserve: 100352,1315    MSN: olsonsoft
See
http://nz.com/olson/
for more details or download an evaluation version from
ftp://nz.com/olson/hwa21.zip

I've attached a file that describes some of the other tools on the
market.  Let me know if you have any questions.

G.

=====================================
Grant Hogarth, Information Developer, Onyx Graphics Corp. Midvale, UT
grant -at- onyxgfx -dot- com   WWW:http://www.onyxgfx.com  FTP:ftp://ftp.onyxgfx.com
#include <std_disclaim>

"I think animal testing is a terrible idea;
they get all nervous and give the wrong answers."
     -- A Bit of Fry and Laurie

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