Tool to review help files?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Parul Jain wondered: <<Is there any tool to review help files, the way we
track changes in MS Word.>>

I've heard (but haven't confirmed) that if you're producing WinHelp from
Word and combine a tool like RoboHelp with Word's revision tracking, you can
occasionally experience problems such as crashes and file corruption. But
since the Windows Help compiler produces WinHelp from RTF source files, you
should be able to open a copy of those source files in Word and edit them
using revision tracking. This way, you leave the original file untouched,
and can transfer the changes manually from the edited copies into the
original. Tedious, but it should work.

You could use the same approach with HTML files (as opposed to compiled HTML
Help) with various products that basically let you write graffiti on Web
sites. Here's what I said about this (available in the archives) a few years
back:

Just spotted an interesting article in Publish about tools for annotating
Web sites (Stauffer, T. 2000. Annotate this! Publish, September:63-65).
Probably the best known of these is "ThirdVoice", which lets you annotate a
Web site so that only someone using the ThirdVoice software (a free
download) can see your annotations. This software originally began as a kind
of "graffiti" tool, so you could post comments on a Web site without the
owner's permission, but seems to have evolved into a broader and more useful
annotation and linking tool. As a result, it seems like it might be useful
for groups collaborating on (e.g, peer-reviewing) a Web page or site design.
Has anyone used this software, or something similar?

For those who are interested, here's the list of (free) tools that Publish
presented in their article:
ThirdVoice: www.thirdvoice.com
Annotate.net: www.annotate.net
Flyswat: www.flyswat.com
GuruNet: www.guru.net
Webforia: www.webforia.com

I haven't had time to play around with any of these products, but they all
sound interesting for various techwhirler-type purposes.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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