Re: UN*X Help

[Keith Arnett <keith_arnett -at- RESTON -dot- OMD -dot- STERLING -dot- COM>]

     David:

     You would also want to include CDE (Common Desktop Environment) Help, used
     by HP, IBM and others (it is SGML based).  IBM's older AIXwindows
     environment uses a third-party help system called InfoExplorer from
     KnowledgeSet Corp. of Sunnyvale CA--don't know anything else about it,
     except that it appears to work OK on one of our older systems.

     You should also check out Bristol Technology's HyperHelp (www.bristol.com),
     which offers cross-platform help delivery for several UNIX variants.

     WebHelp from Blue Sky (www.blue-sky.com) seems to be a promising
     alternative to NetHelp.  The latest version of RoboHTML is supposed to be
     able to create WebHelp pages directly from existing plain-vanilla HTML
     pages, and it is said to be browser independent.

     We have investigated JavaHelp, and several other Java-based help browsers,
     and determined that the technology is still too much in its infancy for us
     to commit to at this time, although if you are an early-adopter type, it
     may be for you.

     We've done a fairly extensive research on delivering help on UNIX, with the
     secondary objective of being able to deploy the help to other platforms
     with little or no change.  Thus far, the most attactive solution seems to
     be WebHelp.  Please feel free to email me off the list if you'd like to
     discuss this further.

     Hope this helps.

     Keith Arnett
     Technical Writer
     Sterling Software, Inc./Operations Management Division
     Reston, VA USA

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: UN*X Help
Author:  David Slonosky <SlonoskD -at- ITLS -dot- COM> at INTERNET
Date:    6/18/98 11:02 AM


I was curious as to the current methods of help delivery for UNIX
systems, and to the degree of variation between flavors of UNIX.
Here's the current rough list I've made up. Any additions or corrections
to this list would be appreciated.

1. man format
2. info format
3. HTML-based help
4. Solaris Answerbook(?)

It seems that all help in UNIX systems is very text-based. I've sent a
request to the folks who make the RTF to UNIX X-Window conversion tool,
so I am aware of that possibility. NetHelp from Netscape would have
offered an interesting choice if they'd kept it up. And of course there
is JavaHelp from Sun, which I have yet to fully investigate. (i.e. I
have the help system and the Java beta on my system but haven't found
time to play with it all yet.)

David Slonosky
Documentation Specialist
InterTrans Logistics Solutions, an i2 company

David -dot- Slonosky -at- itls -dot- com