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| HELP! | January/February 1999 |
by Bill Burns
(Bill Burns is a member of the Snake River Chapter of the STC. This review is reprinted with permission from the November 1998 issue of The Sidebar, the newsletter of the Snake River Chapter.)
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If your manager is like many of the uninitiated in the realm of documentation and HTML, you've probably already been given your marching orders to use HTML for documentation. Scarier yet, you may even have been ordered to build all future help projects in HTML. Oh yeah, and convert your existing help systems to HTML as well. That ol' web fever has got pointy-haired managers all over making these decisions with no understanding of the implications for your job. Well, fortunately, the folks at Blue Sky Software have a product that just may save you from considerable pain: RoboHelp HTML Edition.
RoboHelp HTML Edition allows you to develop Microsoft HTML, generic HTML-based help, and full web sites, all in a visual authoring environment. Unlike its sibling product from Blue Sky, RoboHelp HTML Edition does not require the use of Microsoft Word, but instead uses the HTML Editing Engine by MicroVision Development. In addition to handling basic HTML requirements, this editor also allows you to include JavaScript, ActiveX controls, and some cool DHTML effects such as fade-in text and transitions to liven up your help project. Using RoboHelp HTML Edition, you can easily design your HTMLHelp system with related topics menus, popups, expanding and collapsing contents, and a keyword index. You can then compile the project into a single file for distribution. (This option works only if your users are running MS Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher since HTMLHelp requires some of the browser DLLs to run.) If you don't have the luxury of choosing a browser, you can save the project as WebHelp. This cool Java applet provides the contents and indexing features that would otherwise be lacking if you chose to write vanilla HTML files. The applet seems to run in Netscape and on Windows and Macintosh platforms. (It seems to have a few bugs in Internet Explorer for Macintosh.) Another excellent feature is the Help-to-HTML conversion tool. This tool takes compiled WinHelp projects and converts them to various HTML-based help formats, including WebHelp, HTMLHelp, Windows CE help (which is also HTML based), |
Netscape NetHelp, or even into a standard web site. That should please folks who are tormented by the demands of Dilbertesque management pushing them to "get on the web yesterday." Naturally, I wouldn't be my curmudgeonly self if I didn't complain a little here. (After all, that's what makes me a consultant!) The visual editor doesn't have many of the features you'd expect in RoboHelp. Forget those hot-key sequences, drag-and-drop text editing, and other nifty features to which RoboHelp and Word users have become accustomed. Also, if you need to exercise any element of control over the HTML code, you may find RoboHelp HTML Edition a tad frustrating, especially when it renumbers your ordered lists. (I guess in some ways it is like Word 97.) Coding by hand is no guarantee either, since the editor will automatically reformat (and recode) your file if you make any layout changes in the visual editor.
In addition, this tool offers few new solutions if your product needs to be localized. HTMLHelp still does not support non-Latin 1 character sets, and many of the ActiveX controls and JavaScripts are downright localization-unfriendly. The jury is still out on the WebHelp applet, but the likelihood that the index engine has support for languages other than English is probably pretty small. For internationalized help projects, this tool offers little more than the other major site development tools, such as FrontPage or NetObjects Fusion. If you have to go to HTMLHelp now, if you need to develop cross-platform HTML-based help with the same functionality as WinHelp, or if you need to convert help projects to HTMLHelp, RoboHelp HTML Edition can help get you there quickly and give you some cool features to boot. However, unless you're doing HTML-based help development, don't bother with this application. RoboHelp HTML Edition costs $499 by itself or comes with the RoboHelp Office at $899--a steep price for a visual HTML development tool, regardless of the features. The Help-to-HTML conversion tool takes compiled WinHelp projects and converts them to various HTML-based help formats |
