What ever happened to HTML help files? Wasn't that the standard for a
long time?
Regards,
Stephen
On 21-Jul-06, at 11:40 PM, Brendan Murphy wrote:
Tommy Single wrote:
Does anyone know of a good help system that I could use for free
to create a
help center for my application?
I struggled with this very topic for along time. Here is my
experience with it.
When I started looking at help systems, my main goal was to have
a maintenance free cross platform system. That's a pretty tall
order. I looked at (and bought) UniHelp and it is a fine product
for what it does and is well suited for cross platform usage, but
fails miserably when it comes to creating maintenance free help
files. I tried it on a couple of products, but gave up on it. It
is not a productive system.
What I finally arrived at is using PDF files for documentation.
They are easy to create, look professional, and you have the power
of your word processor to edit them. You only need one line of
code to launch the PDF file from your program (can't get any
easier than that).
The only drawback is dealing with PDF bookmarks. There are only
two solutions I know of for creating the PDF bookmarks. The first
is to buy Adobe Acrobat and insert them manually. The second is to
use an plugin called PDF Maker in conjunction with Microsoft Word
on the PC (can't be the Mac) and have it generate them based of
your table of contents. I find PDF Maker to be fussy and leaves me
with a lot of clean up of the bookmarks after it finishes (but
this is a lot less work than creating them manually). In the end,
I have decided to leave out bookmarks for now and put them back in
when someone out there comes out with a solution that is elegant
and reliable.
In the past I used Word as the basis for doing the editing, but I
have found Apple's Pages word processor to be a more elegant
solution and just about the perfect editor for creating
documentation (except for the ability to create PDF bookmarks). I
got tired of the constant hunt and pecking inside of Word in order
to get things done (i.e., productivity) and switched to Pages and
over time this has proved to be the correct decision for me. I
have sent an extensive note to Apple through their feedback system
asking them to add PDF bookmarks to Pages. Hopefully they will do
so in the future.
If anyone out there knows of an easy way to create PDF bookmarks
based of a table of contents that works in a reliable way, please
let me know.
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