WinHelp on Vista

["Evans, Stuart" <stuart -dot- evans -at- ARTISANSW -dot- com>]

Hi,

I currently produce our help using RoboHelp for WinHelp 9 and Word 2000. I deliver the Help as WinHelp files, using the RoboHelp the WinHelp 2000 Explorer View DLL (ROBOEX32.DLL) to provide a tri-pane presentation in WinHelp. To date, I have not migrated to HTML Help because I feel the benefit to our users does not justify migrating 20 integrated help files with 5000 odd topics. 

However, Vista is causing me problems as it appears that Microsoft do not intend to include WinHelp.exe with Vista and they currently do not intend to allow Software providers to install it (last I heard). When I tried to start a WinHelp file on Vista Beta, it prompted me to download the WinHelp from the Microsoft Website - when I followed the link to the Microsoft website, I could not actually download the help engine (because it's beta I guess).

So my questions are as follows:

Do any of you know whether our current help solution (WinHelp files + ROBOEX32.DLL) will work on Vista after the WinHelp engine is downloaded?

Should my company decide that it is not acceptable to expect users to download the help engine, is there an easy way to migrate to HTML Help whilst continuing to edit the topics within Word documents? Note that years ago as a test I used RoboHelp for WinHelp 9 to generate HTML from my source files and the results were very poor on the presentation front. I suspect that later versions of RoboHelp do a better job? 

Like most technical authors, I have to do the best I can in the time available (and there is never enough time), so it does make me wonder why Microsoft are being so awkward about supporting WinHelp on Vista - users are bound to install applications that use WinHelp files.

Thanks in advance,

Stuart.
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