Help Authoring Articles for Software Developers

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If you create technical documentation yourself or prefer to use a writing service, or you are in the process of selecting a help authoring tool for your project, look at the Indoition web-site.

Indoition is a team of experienced technical writers and communicators who provide a variety of quality services. These services include creation of new documentation, improvement of existing technical documentation, writing texts for user interfaces, revision of texts, and so on (you can visit this page for the full list of services).

You will find a number of checklists, helpful information on help authoring tools, screen capture utilities, and other related software. There are more than 250 useful links to resources for technical writers. By the way, you can download all the information as a PDF booklet!

Thus, Indoition is a great combination of useful tips and quality services that can be recommended to professional technical writers and software developers.

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Divcom Software announces the release of HelpSmith 3. This version of the popular help authoring tool introduces new features such as a possibility to create topic Templates, use text Variables both in the built-in word processor and almost everywhere in the entire help project.

There is also a new customizable Breadcrumbs object which is replaced in the compiled help system with the location of the selected help topic in the Table of Contents. Depending on the settings of the Breadcrumbs placeholder and structure of your help system, the path can also include clickable hyperlinks for easier navigation through the parent chapters.

Another great feature of HelpSmith 3 is the ability to create permanent topic headers that are not scrolled with the topic’s main content. Such a header or Non-scrolling Area usually contains the topic’s title and navigation elements. The Non-scrolling Area works in the HTML Help as well as in Web Help output help format. Unlike other help authoring tools, the developers of HelpSmith continue to follow the “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” principle, so the Non-scrolling Area can be easily added for a template or for an individual topic directly in the HelpSmith’s built-in word processor.

The developers have also added new possibilities making it quite easy to provide a Context-sensitive Web Help system for your web application. A Web Help system generated with HelpSmith contains built-in scripts that process URL parameters for displaying a specific help topic. So you can simply add hyperlinks from your web application to specific help topics of your Web Help system and such a link will display the required topic and save all the navigation frames. Moreover, the topic displayed will be found and highlighted in the Table of Contents.

There are also other new possibilities added in the new HelpSmith release. You can read the full list of new features and improvements in the blog of the HelpSmith team. Or, you can visit the HelpSmith’s official website and download the latest version of this great product.

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An article from HelpSmith’s website, a powerful yet very easy-to-use help authoring tool with dynamic styles and other unique features.

As a technical writer you might have tried many help authoring tools - from low cost applications to complex and expensive systems. So now you may be asking yourself why you should choose HelpSmith for your help project. There is no need to say that HelpSmith is a fast, powerful, and affordable help authoring tool. Let’s better take a look at what you can do with it.

Create HTML Help (CHM) Files
With HelpSmith, you can easily create CHM (HTML Help) files. Based upon the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get principle, HelpSmith provides you with a powerful word processor with native support for dynamic styles and the live spell checker feature. So the process of working on a help system simply gets to a new quality level. You can use graphical images, insert tables, create hyperlinks, and so on. Finally, being a complete help authoring solution, HelpSmith allows you to create the Table of Contents and the keyword Index for your help file just in several minutes due to the built-in editors with drag-and-drop support.

Create Web Help from the Same Source Help Project
You can create Web Help by exporting all the data from your help project into a series of HTML files: simply click the “Create Web Help” command on the “Project” menu or click the corresponding button on the toolbar (similarly to when you export your help project into other help formats) and HelpSmith will prepare all the necessary files. A WebHelp system generated with HelpSmith includes a collapsible Table of Contents (similar to the TOC in CHM), an alphabetical Index, and the Search feature.

All you have to do then is just upload all the files of your Web Help system to your web server or simply copy them to a shared folder if you want to provide access for other people in your corporate network.

Supply Printed Manual Documentation
You can use HelpSmith to supply technical documentation both in the electronic and printed formats. With HelpSmith, you can see all the results as they are before the final version of the documentation is compiled or printed out. You can print out the manual directly from HelpSmith; or you can export the manual into MS Word, for example, to demonstrate it to your clients who may have no HelpSmith installed on their computer.

Get the Power of Dynamic Styles
Mentioned above, the HelpSmith system of dynamic styles is a unique but must-have feature for any help authoring tool. Dynamic styles allow you to store all formatting information separately from topic documents, which lets you make any changes in formatting at any time without having to manually process lots of help topics.

Moreover, with dynamic styles, you do not have to apply the same attributes over and over while writing help topics. Simply select the part of text and then double-click the necessary style to set the required formatting attributes to the selection.

Additionally, HelpSmith allows you to specify alternative views for a particular style… Read More…

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Developers frequently ask me how they can connect HTML Help (.CHM) files to their VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) programs. A simple way to achive that is to use HTML Help API calls directly.

First, I would suggest you to create a separate module (for your convenience) where you should write the following code:

Now you can display any topic from your .CHM file. To do so, simply call the HTMLHelp() function. It may look like:

Please note that MyHelpFile contains the file path to your .CHM file, and MyTopicContextID is the numeric topic ID as defined in your help project. The MyTopicContextID variable must be of the Long type.

As you may have noticed, there are additional constants declared in the above block of code. If you wish to show, say, the Table of Contents, just pass the HH_DISPLAY_TOC constant to the HTML Help() function. Similarly, you can display the Help Index and Search tabs.

For example:

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Using screenshots in help files makes your program much easier to learn and more comprehensible. But simple screenshots, which just demonstrate your program working, are not enough. The screenshots should include so-called hotspots. These are predefined regions that can be clicked on by the user to display context-sensitive information.

How do you create images with hotspots? This functionality is provided with the Segmented Hyper Graphics (.SHG) file format, which was developed for use with WinHelp (.HLP) files. However, Help Development Studio lets you easily use .SHG files for both WinHelp (.HLP) and HTML Help (.CHM) files. All you need to do is simply insert a .SHG file into the text of a topic and compile your help file. With Help Development Studio, you can use .SHG files in HTML Help as if they were .BMP, .JPG, .GIF or any other graphical file formats.

We offer an excellent tool, which has been specifically designed to create images and screenshots to be used in help files. This is Hotspot Builder, another of the help authoring products available on our Web site. Hotspot Builder is not just an editor of Segmented Hyper Graphics (.SHG) files; it is also a powerful tool for the efficient creation of screenshots and processing of images. The program includes a variety of different screen capturing tools such as “spy-tool”, which allows you to make screenshots by capturing only the required dialog-boxes. There is no need to copy an entire window and paste it to a separate editor like Paint, via the Windows Clipboard.

Moreover, Hotspot Builder allows you to change image color depth and also includes some special features for preparing Segmented Hyper Graphics (.SHG) to be used in HTML Help. This would make the tool useful for those who would like to use .SHG in their HTML Help Workshop (.HHP) projects, but prefer not to use Help Development Studio. As mentioned above, Help Development Studio fully supports the Segmented Hyper Graphics format and automatically compiles .SHG files into a HTML Help (.CHM) file, therefore, Hotspot Builder’s special HTML features are not required by those users. This, of course, does not diminish the usefulness of Hotspot Builder for Help Development Studio users, who will find it to be an indispensable member in their help authoring toolkit.