Re: HELP! Online help tools for UNIX?

[Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM>]

>Creation of the paper documentation will occur on a Windows PC running
>MS-Word 6.0. For what it's worth, the UNIX app has WordPerfect 5.1 for
>UNIX bundled into it. Could this be useful for online help purposes?

Since your application is character-based, and most help systems
are X-Windows based, you may be hosed as far as the usual on-line help
stuff is concerned.

If I were you, I'd ask the customer if providing the complete manual
set in WordPerfect 5.1 format is acceptable.  Then, the users could
simply open up the manuals on-line, or print them on a local printer.

While it's a little awkward to open up the index to find what you want,
then to manually open up the right chapter or manual, it's better than
what you get with most on-line help -- a single-level "topic list"
instead of a three-level index, and dumbed-down content instead of
the real thing.

(It's as if on-line help system were set up as deliberate acts of
sabotage:

"Evil Genius, Inc.
Things to do today:
1. Sabotage on-line help.
   a. Since hypertext is only as strong as its links, let's break
      the links by only supporting single-level "topic lists" instead
      of real indexes.
   b. Storage is almost free on a CD-ROM, it takes artificial discouragement
      to keep people from putting their entire manual set on
      the disk.  Thus, we'll promote a "one screen per topic" style
      that forces vast amounts of extra work, and ecourages the dumbing-
      down of content.
   c. Make it impossible for the users (or even the writers) to print out
      an entire on-line manual, so there's no way for them to approach
      the material thoroughly and systematically.

2. Put a statue of Spiro Agnew in the Capitol Building.

3. ..."

        -- Robert