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A bit late to the party, since this one took a rather circuitous route to
bounce back to me as undeliverable...
Allison Clements has <<...read several opinions on HATs on this listserv.
However, I specifically need one that is user friendly for creating context
sensitive help for a Windows Application (and Internet app if it makes a
difference).>>
Caveat the first: Help-authoring tools (HATs) are like gloves: everyone has
different preferences (indeed, some prefer mittens!), and a pair that fits
me perfectly will chafe you or fall off your hands when you try to wear
them. Most of the HATs currently on the market are identical, feature for
feature, and differ primarily in how you access the feature and how well
it's implemented. You can still get the job done reasonably well with any of
the tools. Before making a buying decision, order a demo from each vendor to
see if it suits your style of work.
Caveat the second: The demo versions of the software are time-limited, and
once you've installed one, you often can't uninstall it and then reinstall
it if you run out of time. (This happened to me with RoboHelp when our
testbed computer was made unavailable for a month.) So if you're going to
install the software on a specific computer, particularly if you don't want
to muck up your own computer by installing a bunch of software that might
wreck something, make sure you have time to complete your evaluation.
I've just completed a more-or-less formal evaluation of the latest releases
of the big four: RoboHelp, ForeHelp, Doc-to-Help, and Dreamweaver combined
with DevaTools. RoboHelp and ForeHelp are comparable in user-friendliness
and power, with RoboHelp getting a slight edge in usability (perhaps mainly
because I've used it before and am new to using ForeHelp) and ForeHelp
getting a huge edge in cost and in the inoffensiveness of their marketing
and licensing practices. (eHelp's marketing department really, really needs
to get a clue about how annoying they are.) RoboHelp has a larger community
of experienced users to turn to if you encounter a problem, and there's now
a book out on using it, which is an advantage over ForeHelp; on the other
hand, eHelp claims that we users all told them not to provide printed
documentation (yeah, right), so you have to order the docs separately and at
additional cost (US$40) if you get the wrong customer-service rep on the
phone. Doc-to-Help struck me as kludgy and awkward, in large part because it
seems to assume that you will be creating a printed manual first and then
dumping that online as a help system--a really bad design choice, in my not
particularly humble opinion. It seems to have all the tools you'll need in a
help-development tool, but I considered it strongly handicapped by its
metaphor (print-->help), which makes accomplishing some things awkward as a
dedicated HAT, and it uses some odd keyboard shortcuts. It also had the
worst online help files in my opinion. Dreamweaver plus DevaTools seems to
hold enormous promise, but there are some rough edges and it won't let you
create WinHelp--you're stuck with HTMLHelp or various other HTML formats,
and I consider these to be inferior to WinHelp in most aspects. Moreover,
there's no dedicated tool for creating "What's this?" (tooltip) help.
<<I would like to avoid using programmers to do context mapping.>>
You can't really do that unless you have access to the program code so you
can insert the context IDs directly in the code by yourself. If you mean
that you want to eliminate the use of context IDs, then you also eliminate
the possibility of true context-sensitive help, since the help engine needs
these IDs to know which help topic to display.
<<I do have a budget, but I do not want to spend money for bells and
whistles I don't need.>>
One thing to consider is purchasing just the specific tool you need; for
example, if you're producing only WinHelp, you could buy RoboHelp Classic
rather than RoboHelp Office, and save a fair bit of money thereby.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html
"I vowed [that] if I complained about things more than three times, I had to
do something about it."--Jon Shear
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