Technical Writing, Help Authoring Tools, Jobs, and More

HelpSmith team describes improvements made in their help authoring tool since the initial release and shares plans for the near future.

“Apart from the significant features such as the Web Help format, we’ve also added a number of other useful tools that have been introduced with HelpSmith 1.5.2…” Read more…
From HelpSmith Team’s Blog.

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Create full-featured HTML Help files easily with HelpSmith.

HelpSmith is an innovative help authoring tool allowing you to create CHM HTML Help files. The HelpSmith’s ultimate toolkit with its visual approach takes the process of writing technical documentation for your software applications to a new quality level.

Oriented to professional technical writers and software developers, HelpSmith integrates the most powerful features a help authoring tool can have, and, at the same time, has a modern easy-to-use interface. The powerful WYSIWYG (“What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get”) text processor, support for Unicode, advanced approach to working with graphics, live spell checking, and many other useful features make HelpSmith the complete help authoring solution.

The new help authoring standard is already here! Download your FREE evaluation copy of HelpSmith today!

 

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QuickHelp has help authoring and deployment for Win 95..XP, Mac and Linux.

QuickHelp is a help authoring and deployment tool. QuickHelp consists of a Builder edition for creating, formatting and linking help topics and a Viewer edition for deploying them to end-users.

The help information resides in an XML file distributed with the QuickHelp Viewer. For the end-user, QuickHelp supports a table of contents, an index with automatic search field, word searches across topics, color highlighted topic text with hypertext links, formatted images, tables, actions and context sensitive help from applications.

For the developer, QuickHelp provides a highly productive editing environment to create, verify and maintain application help that can be deployed to Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Linux.

 

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Create online help files from any point in your program.

DC Help Authority is the only program that lets you create online help files from any point in your program. It helps you write multiple help topics, assign them to different areas, and link to them from anywhere, down to the smallest grid and column. With DC Help Authority, you can give your application a unique edge by making it more comprehensive, intuitive, and user-friendly. Instead of loading one large help file, DC Help Authority divides it into separate topics that describe each state, situation, or feature of your program. Each topic is linked to the corresponding code, so that accessing Help will lead to the help file linked to that area - much like Microsoft’s WinHelp. This way, your users won’t have to search keywords or scroll through pages of text.

DC Help Authority runs on all COM-based applications such as Borland C++, Delphi, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic C++. It uses a simple, easy-to-remember syntax, so your help code only needs a few lines of text and works with major programming languages. The Configuration Utility also allows you to determine which languages can be used with DC Help Authority. In the Help Authority system, the sensitive help feature can be triggered by the F12 key. For example, you can create and define four fields in a table, label it “Help,” and paste it onto your project code. The fields Tag, Id, Description, and Contents can be defined accordingly (text or memo) and assigned specific lengths. You do not need to be an advanced programmer in order to install and fully use Help Authority. Its setup program automatically registers the DC_HelpAuthority10.dll file on your system.

 

To integrate it into your project, simply select ‘add reference’ from the project menu; click the ‘browse’ button to locate these DLL: 1. your DC_HelpAuthority10.DLL, 2. AxInterop.MSDataGridLib.dll, 3. Interop.MSDataGridLib.dll, 4. adodb.dll which all of them by default are located in “c:\windows\system32″.

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Creates configurable HTML and HHC files of Contents for any files types.

Easy Index Generator provides fast and easy creation of configurable index files (files of Contents) for any files types in HTML (both as single page and as frameset) and HHC formats, which can be used in CHM (HTMLHelp), eBooks, online Help, as DataCD menu, as sitemap of your website providing quick access to HTML pages, graphics, media files, shared documents, applications, archives etc. You can specify indexed file types, sort project items by moving them up and down, creating logical sections etc.

The program can create two types of tree menus of indexed files in output HTML file: static menus and click-to-open menus.
Generated file(s) automatically will be placed in the indexing folder.

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