Re: Query: Users of ForeHelp?

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- STARBASECORP -dot- COM>]

I responded to Geoff privately with some comparisons
of RoboHelp and ForeHelp, but since the discussion has
gone public, I've a few points to add.

I inherited a project done in ForeHelp when I first
started at StarBase and have edited this help file
twice for two different products. The first time, the
message topic that the project architect created (it
was over 600 lines long) corrupted itself two days
before product release. The bold characters would
travel (literally -- travel -- while I watched --
and I was stone, cold sober at the time) through
the paragraphs. While I fixed one, another would
wend its way southward through the text.

The second time I "redid" the file, one of the
topics became corrupt. I could not get to it. It did
not exist in the .rtf file. But ForeHelp insisted that
the topic existed, would not let me delete it, and would
not scroll past it. This effectively put a block on all
search and replace functions and on the spelling verifier
(because the spelling verifier always starts at the beginning
of the file).
However, it has behaved itself thusfar.
I must admit, I miss some of the nice graphical touches that
ForeHelp offers (such as seeing the bitmaps and sheg files
rather than the annotations for them and that nice navigator).
I do, however, appreciate the fact that RoboHelp allows you
to edit footnotes by hand -- it's much faster when you're
adding the same topic macros to a dozen or so topics. And I
*love* the fact that you can just select the dialog box ID's
from the .hm file that C++ creates rather than having to
type in the context sensitive ID's in ForeHelp.

And as a budding usability specialist, I will never forgive
ForeHelp for putting Edit Picture on the Text menu. ;-)

Sue Gallagher
StarBase Corp, Irvine CA
sgallagher -at- starbasecorp -dot- com