Re: MasterHelp [was Re: online/manual debate]

[Heli Roosild <HeliR -at- MSMAILHQ -dot- NETIMAGE -dot- COM>]

Mary (and others who might be interested),

MasterHelp installed smoothly on my system, and I have not yet encountered
significant bugs.  Of course I haven't worked with the program very much
yet, and I know I won't be pushing it to its limits any time soon.

The reason I selected MasterHelp is that I need helpfiles, but  I don't have
time to  build them from scratch. With MasterHelp, I can put my paper doc on
line with  some automatic although rudimentary hypertext links in a matter
of a day or less. And, MasterHelp not only has a browser, but also
annotation and bookmark facilities--and no licensing fees.

The one MasterHelp problem I encountered was that it choked on my graphics.
But I can live without those at this point. And MasterHelp's technical
support was most supportive. (:-)

The real difficulty I have is with RTF formats.  We do our docs in
FrameMaker, and the conversion from Frame's RTF to Word's RTF is not a
pretty sight.  Currently, I plan to build a set of macros to clean up the
formatting problems  in Word, before I bring the file into MasterHelp.

Incidentally, when the MasterHelp folks (Performance Software) learned that
I was working with FrameMaker, the president of the company called me and
asked that I send them one of my Frame RTF files to look at. Yesterday, one
of their developers called to say that they should be able to fix their
program so that it will work with the Frame RTF directly and convert the
formatting correctly.

I can't ask for much more, right? But of course, I haven't built an actual
helpfile yet, only tests. So wish me luck! (:-)

 --Heli
========================================================
Heli L. Roosild                    Network Imaging Systems
helir -at- msmailhq -dot- netimage -dot- com        Herndon VA  22070