StrataFrame Forum » .NET Forums » General .NET Discussion » Writing help files

Writing help files

Ralph Rutschmann — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:51:28 GMT

Hi all,

may I ask what kind of software to use for writing help files? Something recommendable?

TIA and friendly greetings,

Ralph

RE: Writing help files

StrataFrame Team — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:51:28 GMT

Ralph,

We haven't tried any of those products. HelpStudio Lite (the free version) came packaged with the Visual Studio SDK and we liked it much more than RoboHelp, so we started using it. We went to the full version of HelpStudio because the full version is required to compile .chm files. The lite version only does Help 2.0 which requires the Microsoft Document Viewer (think Visual Studio help).

A word of caution, though, we tried the DocumentX for our class libraries initially, and it had lots of issues with compiling help from our DLLs. It took some 19 hours to analyze and build the help for just the 4 core SF DLLs, and half of the time would crash. The SandCastle script runs in about 10 minutes.

RE: Writing help files

Ralph Rutschmann — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:44:12 GMT

Hei, many thanks to all. :-)

Did someone try HyperText, FastHelp, ForeHelp, HelpScribble or HelpMagician? What about Help&Manual? Flare is priced a bit above my limit...

There are so many help authoring tools out there, I'm confused and really don't know which to choose.

I had a look at FastHelp, and it seems easy to learn, not very expensive, and allows to develop the same help file in different languages for multilingual apps.

But at the first look, all hats (help authoring tools) look nice...

Some more comments about hats?

TIA and friendly greetings,

Ralph

RE: Writing help files

Trent L. Taylor — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:37:04 GMT

We used to use RoboHelp and we blew off a lot of fingers trying to get large help files out the door....definitely DO NOT recommend RoboHelp!!! :)

RE: Writing help files

Michael Reese — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:34:59 GMT

Robohelp and Captivate.

Not very comfortable since being purchased by Adobe.

RE: Writing help files

Trent L. Taylor — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:23:34 GMT

That is what we use, HelpStudio. We use SandCastle to produce our class libraries, but HelpStudio for everything else.

RE: Writing help files

Ivan George Borges — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:03:05 GMT

Hi Ralph.

Have a look at HelpStudio from Innovasys (www.innovasys.com)