Re: WRITING ONLINE HELP

[Janet Ring <janet -at- LIVEPICTURE -dot- COM>]

At 09:41 AM 11/18/97 -0500, Jon Leer wrote:
>Can you provide advice on:
>* best tool for development and future maintenance (customer will maintain)

Personally, I like RoboHelp for my Help authoring tool. However, unless the customer has the budget to purchase RoboHelp, using Word and the WinHelp engine is more cost effective for them to do maintenance afterwards. I have only used authoring tools thus far, so I can't advise you as to the level of difficulty the client might have using Word and the WinHelp engine.

The other option is to use HTML Help, which hasn't become standard yet, but is being done and is cross-platform.

Here are a couple of useful Web sites:
Windows Help Universe
http://www.weisner.com/universe/index.html

WinHelp Forum
http://www.realtime.com/~daigle/winhelp.htm

>Other requirements? Such as can you develop the help files on a Windows 95
>box or must you develop on an NT box in order to run on NT?

I developed a couple of Help files on Windows 95 that ran seamlessly on NT 4.0. If the product will be running on an earlier version of NT, you'll need to do some more investigation.

A good reference book:
Designing Windows 95 Help by Deaton and Zubak (Que)

Good luck,
Janet