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Subject:Using Acrobat and Help in Proprietary Software? From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, "Loren R. Elks" <lelks -at- exstream -dot- com> Date:Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:14:41 -0400
Loren R. Elks wondered: <<Our C++ product is set up so that you can get
context sensitive help. Customers can press F1 on any screen and an
Acrobat window opens to the page in our documentation that contains
information detailing what the user sees. Does any one else out there
use Software to PDF links in a Windows environment? How do you affirm
that your links are correct and in working order? Are there any
programs that could help automate these processes?>>
I don't use PDF in this way, but when I created online help, manually
testing the links was part of the QA process. This took two steps:
First, the programmers took the topic IDs I gave them and applied their
own reality check, occasionally asking me whether I was really sure
about a particular choice. So we had two sets of eyes looking over the
initial selection of topics. Second, I went through the software and
tested every Help button to confirm it went to the right place.
Although you can easily automate the testing of links in tools such as
RoboHelp, it's important to remember that this only tells you about
broken links and orphaned topics. Until automated link testers can
parse the context and content of each help call (i.e., until they can
semantically compare the contents of a dialog box or software feature
with the contents of the linked help topic), there's no substitute for
human testing--and your tester has to drink lots of coffee or take
other measures to stay alert to ensure that they don't let their eyes
glaze over and end up doing nothing more than testing _the existence_
of links rather than their relevance.
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