Hi Everyone if (HateReading) and (WantToMakeHelpFiles) then begin Goto The Tools; end else begin
I'm back to share some of my discoveries of making the dreaded help files. I hope this will help everyone as when I last brought this subject up on the discussion list we all came to the agreement that making help files for programs is not fun but necessary. Well I asked about what tools should I use and how I should go about it. Definitely most people were in favour of the website driven help file which personally I have no problem with but I still think nothing beats a good looking CHM file when working in a windows environment. end; :The Tools HelpMaker One of the most user friendly FREE programs that I've found for making help files is a program called HelpMaker. Check out their website : http://www.vizacc.com. I found it particularly interesting as to why they make this software free, its worth a read. Microsoft Help Workshop This you can get from Microsoft!!! And yes it is very difficult to use but I only use the HTML Help Image Editor in this package. And saving png files is definitely a must especially if you want your screen captures to come out properly in the help file. Delphi Help Toolkit Once you have made the great looking chm help file then you need to plug it into Delphi and for this you will definitely need the Delphi Help Toolkit. It was here http://www.helpware.net when I last checked but you can look for the hh.pas and hh_func.pas files to get a download link. It makes it very easy to implement a help file from delphi. Below is a sample of some code I wrote to help me do this from my forms : procedure TfrmDatamodule.OpenHelp(FormName: String); begin HtmlHelp(GetDesktopWindow, PAnsiChar(sProgramPath+'\ExampleHelpFile.chm::'+FormName+'.htm'), HH_DISPLAY_TOPIC, 0); end; An easy way that this works is that if you're like me and name your forms properly then making the help for them requires only that you keep to your form naming conventions! All right I thinks thats about it in a nutshell, so if you have any comments about this I would like to see them or if you try the above software out and make use of these recommendations let me know. Andre van Zuydam Spiceware Software __________________________________________________ Delphi-Talk mailing list -> Delphi-Talk@elists.org http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi-talk
