Online Helps: Other Help-Authoring Software

Although RoboHelp has dominated the help-authoring market for years, its days may be numbered unless MadCap software does well with its Flare product. Meanwhile, it's a good idea for you to know several other help-authoring tools: specifically, Microsoft's currently free HTML Help Workshop, Author-IT, and Doc-To-Help.

Learning the Procedures

As a group let's divvy up the important tasks that you use a help-authoring tool for, each of us learn the task, document it, then compile our efforts. Whichever help-authoring tool you use, these are the essential tasks:

• Start a project, save it, compile it, know where the project files reside on the computer.
• Create multiple topics, enter some text, link them with hypertext links.
• Create a TOC that links to the topics not just to the top of topics but to spots within those topics.
• Create an index that links not just to the top of topics but to spots within those topics. Create index subentries and See links from the index.
• Do standard formatting: use bold, italics, color, other fonts, different font sizes, indented text, text with varied top or bottom margins, bulleted and numbered lists (along with nested lists and restarted numbered lists)
• Incorporate graphics and tables in helps.
• Use some form of stylesheets in helps.
• Create popup helps.
• Import files developed in other formats.

Writing about the Procedures

1. As a group, decide on the format and style you want to use and incorporate as much of it into a RoboHelp stylesheet as you can.
2. Everybody in this project should import this stylesheet into their parts of this project and use it.
3. Write quick-reference notes on the tasks you are handling.
4. Share these files and each merge them all into one help project.

Revising

Your instructor will review these quick-reference notes rapidly, requesting revisions if necessary and recording an "ok" in the gradebook when no revisions are needed.