Tips on Online Help

1. Tips on Online Help Tharun Unni

2. About this Presentation • Access Points in Online Help • Life Cycle • Choosing a Delivery Format • Authoring Tool • Authoring Process • Intergrating with the Software • Platform-Specific Issues

3. Access Points in Online Help • Task-Oriented Topics • Table of Contents (TOC) • Topics • Context-Sensitive Help: • Dialog Level • Field Level (What’s This Help) • Other Modes of Access • Index • Search • Favorites

4. Life Cycle • Decide the Delivery Format • Choose an Authoring Tool • Use a Help Authoring Tool • Use a Publishing Tool and convert the source using the Help Authoring Tool • Follow the Documentation Life Cycle • Integration and Delivery • Platform-Specific Issues

5. Choosing a Delivery Format • Platform-Dependent (compiled) • CHM • HLP files • Platform-Independent • HTML/XML files • Applets • Images

6. Choose an Authoring Tool • HTML + Notepad + Compiler • Authoring tool • RoboHelp: • Author in RoboHelp • Convert from other sources such as Word or FrameMaker • Webworks Publisher • Convert from other sources such as Word or FrameMaker

7. Authoring Process • Typical documentation development life cycle • Building Blocks • HTML, XML, or RTF • Images • Project Files • Build or Project File (HPJ or HHP) • Table of Contents (CNT) • Index (IDX)

8. Integrating with Software • Compiled • Decide who will assign the help topic IDs • Include MAP files in the Project File • #definetopic_nameNUM • Authoring tool may have an automatically generate MAP File option. • If you cannot disable this, take a backup copy of your map file.

9. Platform-Specific Issues • On Unix and Linux: • filenames are case-sensitive • filename should not contain blank spaces • path is indicated by “/” and not “\” • directory access privileges should be configured • use relative path for images and URLs • Netscape is a popular browser