Re: Help help

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

Dave,

If it were me, I'd start over from scratch - it's hard enough doing
something new for the first time without having to deal with someone
else's old 'stuff'.

As for how to get up and running with Help for the first time ... if you
can find some of the older WinHelp books, they tend to provide a lot of
conceptual information about writing procedural topics, conceptual
topics, and the like, and strategies for linking them all together
seamlessly. Just ignore all the WinHelp 95 references ...

But of there's one key idea that you need to get your head around, I
suggest it's this: Links are free. If you create a whole bunch of topics
that, when taken together, provide all the information necessary to
describe the application, you are then free to create a series of other
pages that provide links to these topics. As a result, you can provide
role-based, experience-based, chronological, or hierarchical
organizations that all consist of links to the individual topic pages.
Within the topic pages themselves, you should link to related topics to
make it easy for users to read and jump around in whatever fashion
appeals to them.

My 2¢,

John Garison





David Loveless wrote <snipped>: