RE: ForeHelp v. RoboHelp for "Single Source"

[Elizabeth Boulet <eboulet -at- mmrd -dot- com>]

On Wednesday, January 26, 2000 3:46 PM, Amy Janczy [SMTP: 
Amy_Janczy -at- uclid -dot- com]
wrote:
>Has anyone tried both products [Robohelp and Forehelp] to do this [single 
source], or >evaluated ForeHelp's "export to print docs" features?

If you're not dead set on Forehelp or Robohelp, I'll send another 
suggestion your way...

I've used a program called HDK (Hypertext Development Kit) by Virtual Media 
to do just what you are describing, and it worked very well (not perfectly, 
but very well). It's an Australian help authoring package that has not 
achieved popular use in the United States (compared to, let's say, 
Robohelp) but has a large following outside of the US. Regardless, it has 
US support that is very good.  It's a well-designed, robust program and has 
a good help system and user's groups. I used it for internal manuals, so 
everything stayed in Word. I don't see any reason why it would be difficult 
to use it with a publishing program.

HDK uses Word as the text editor. It does the standard things that these 
other help authoring tools do (from what I know about help authoring tools 
- my experience is with HDK and RoboHELP).

You can compile for multiple platforms.
You can define the order of topics for the manual, separately from the 
order of topics in your help contents.
You can mark text to be included in the printed manual only and mark text 
to be included in the online help only.

It also has this autoconversion feature that is very, very clever. I 
provided their web site below, in case you want to look into it. They also 
have a little demo that you can download that gives the details.

http://www.virtualmedia.com.au/

---------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Boulet		eboulet -at- mmrd -dot- com		
Online Help Developer	ext. 396
Medical Manager R&D  	http://www.medicalmanager.com/