Re: Help in Evaluating HATs

[Klaus Nji <makaveli_0000 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Thanks for the response.  

We also had Flare on our list of products to evaluate buts its installation has been very painful.  The product will not recognize my version of Word 2003, even though the latter is up to date.

Also, some members of our development team currently run Word 2002, and have no immediate plan on upgrading.

----- Original Message ----
From: "Condo, Candis" <ccondo -at- c-cor -dot- com>
To: Klaus Nji <makaveli_0000 -at- yahoo -dot- com>
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:34:34 PM
Subject: RE: Help in Evaluating HATs

I am under deadline pressures right now so I don't have time to really
examine your request but have you looked at Flare for Word? I have
purchased Flare for Framemaker which was just released last October.

Madcap is the company that produces Flare. The engineering team consists
of many of the old RoboHelp developers who jumped ship when an
opportunity to develop a HAT came their way. Apparently Adobe made the
group really unhappy and most of them left to join Madcap. They really
know how to develop a HAT. I used RoboHelp for many years and liked the
product. They produced that produce. I would be very wary about
RoboHelp's future with Adobe.

My 2-cents,

Candis L. Condo

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+ccondo=c-cor -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+ccondo=c-cor -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
Of Klaus Nji
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 9:24 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Help in Evaluating HATs

I've been reviewing several HATs for our company.  All of our documents
are currently in Word, which are then converted to PDF, a very painful
process.

Before setting out to look for a HAT, we specified our minimum
requirements as follows:

- Tool should take Word files as input with little modification required
on the final content.
- Output formats required:  CHM and PDF, at a minimum.
- There should be support for conditional output, at the text level. We
should be able to control output text based by manipulating certain
variables or attributes.
-  Automation of the ouput building process should be supported.  It
should be possible to write some kind of batch file, which will run
every night to produce the output.
- One shoule be able to customize the PDF output.  At a minimum, the PDF
should have compressed bookmarks.
- Support for Modular Help, where by smaller books can be amalgamated
into bigger books.
- Provision for automatic indexing.
- Seamless acceptance of very large Word documents.
- Good editor.
- Active online user forum.

So far, we have looked at:

- Help & Manual (H&M)
- RoboHelp Office (RH)
- DocToHelp (D2H)
- AuthorIT  (AIT)

Our opinion is as follows:

Help & Manual seems to satisfy almost all of the requirements.  However,
there are some unanswered questions:
- It seems to have limited support for automatic indexing and modular
help.  
- Word documents must be in .rtf format.
- Output from imported Word documents lose all original links.  A pain
to correct.
We liked the intuitive and user friendly interface H&M offerered.  Most
impressive was its flexible support for conditional text.

RoboHelp Office is very good as well but also had some limitations:
- Conditional text is restricted to the inclusiion and exclusion of
text.
- Automating builds does not seem to be supported, or is not well
documented.
- Importing large Word documents and creating PDFs seems clumsy.  Heck,
I have not yet been able to successfully create a PDF document.
- Uncertainty about what Adobe will do with this product.
- Relatively quiet user forum.

DocToHelp has a very good interface but like the others has its
limitations:
- Editing source to making a change in a project variable requires one
to open and close Word.  This is not very good.
- Modular Help is not supported for printed documents.  
- PDF output generation is new and offers very little flexibility.
- Relatively quiet user forum.

So, we are leaning towards D2H or H&M.

What has your experiences been with each product?

Thanks in advance.





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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

WebWorks ePublisher Pro for Word features support for every major Help
format plus PDF, HTML and more. Flexible, precise, and efficient content
delivery. Try it today! http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l

Create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to Help file formats or
printed documentation. Features include single source authoring, team authoring,
Web-based technology, and PDF output. http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList

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