Re: Win-Mac Online Help Development Tools

["Martin, Chuck" <chuckm -at- EVOLVESOFTWARE -dot- COM>]

On Thursday, January 15, 1998 6:03 PM, Tony G. Rocco
[SMTP:trocco -at- NAVIS -dot- COM] wrote:
> My company develops Macintosh software, but is introducing NT versions
of
> its products later this year. Presently we do not provide online help
with
> our applications, but are considering it. After looking at HTML based
> online help, we've decided that we need to develop help using an
authoring
> tool like AppleGuide or RoboHelp. We want to produce online help for
both
> platforms in one process, so we would like to find a single authoring
tool
> for both Mac and NT platforms. Second best would be a conversion
utility
> that would allow us to recompile help files for the other platform.
>
> Can anyone point me in the right direction with this? I would also
> appreciate any advice you can give about developing online help for
both
> Mac and Windows environments. Thanks much.
>
One of the best tools I've found for true online Help cross-platform
development is Altura's QuickHelp. You do all the development of your
source files on a Windows machine, using whatever Help tool you prefer.
You then copy the files to your Macintosh and use the QuickHelp compiler
to create the QuickHelp files. Altura provides a complete Mac API for
calling Help from your Mac application.

QuickHelp has two drawbacks that I see:
1. The cost. It's a per year, per Help file license.
2. The size of the QuickHelp engine. The latest, which provides WinHelp
4.0 functionality, is more than 1 MB in size.

Those aside, it was so easy to simply copy files over to my Mac and
compile without any file conversion at all.

You can probably do close to single sourcing, too, for both platforms,
if the interface for both is the same. You'll probably have to do some
careful work with build tags for any differences between the two.


--
"You don't look American."
"Everyone looks American, because Americans are from everywhere."

- Doonesbury
Chuck Martin, Technical Writer
Evolve Software                  | Personal
chuckm -at- evolvesoftware -dot- com        | writer -at- grin -dot- net
www.evolvesoftware.com           | www.grin.net/~writer