follow-up: cross-platform compatibility for WinHelp

[ddavis <ddavis -at- DIAC -dot- COM>]

Thank you all for your advice on the cross-platform compatibility for
WinHelp question.

In case you missed the responses, here is a synopsis of the suggestions
so far:

Use JavaHelp (a.k.a. JELP?)
Use Bristol's HyperHelp to convert to UNIX. (Perhaps there is a
similarly effective and expensive alternative for Mac?)
Tell the developers to stop whining and use HTML/JAVA-based help.

Given the time and budget constraints for this particular project, the
third option is probably the one we will use. I wanted to provide a few
more details on our delimma, though. Perhaps some of you can relate.

I work for Lucent Technologies, which is primarily a telecommunications
company. Therefore, distribution of our products is generally only
limited the availability of telephone lines, unlike a lot of software
companies who can demand that their customers use semi-current computer
systems. We have many international customers whose entire companies are
still using 386 machines and Windows 3.x. For many of our products, we
still support technology that is 25 years old (not an exaggeration).

In these cases, availability and compatibility with older Web browsers
really becomes an issue. Although we use RoboHelp's WebHelp option to
support our newer, Web-based products that require version 4 or higher
browsers, we are somewhat stuck in situations where we need to go
cross-platform and backward compatible, unless we want to develop three
seperate help systems (and nobody seems to want to spend the time or
money to do that).

FYI:  I talked to a sales rep from RoboHelp who says they are planning
to release an application that will convert WinHelp cross-platform. He
said it should be out with the next RoboHelp release some time in early
to mid-summer.

Thank you all for your help.
Doug

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