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| I am exploring the possibility of moving our company's online help from
| WinHelp to HTML Help. Our software is used on Win 95/98/NT platforms only,
| so there are no cross-platform compatibility issues to worry about.
So long as all your users have IE4 or later (or your company is willing to
ship and install it as part of their own product).
| We use FrameMaker for our manuals, and I'm looking into WebWorks Publisher
| to convert our FrameMaker docs to HTML for the web and HTML Help.
Good idea!
| Can someone give me a brief rundown of how you create either What's This?
| help or context sensitive help? (I suppose these may be one and
| the same in
| HTML Help.)
"What's This?" help is a form of context-sensitive help; they're not exactly
the same thing. For example, a help topic that describes an entire dialog
box is context-sensitive, but it is not a "What's This?" help topic.
Briefly: To generate either context-sensitive help or "What's This?" help,
you would embed custom markers in your FrameMaker docs to identify the
appropriate topics. WebWorks handles the rest during conversion.
| Our software consists of forms with fields for entering data. For each
| field, our users can press F1 and context sensitive help appears. The
| programmers give me the context ID's for the fields and I plug them in to
| the help file. We are not using What's This? help. We are only
| using context
| sensitive help.
| Would HTML Help allow us to use field-level context sensitive help like
| this, or would we have to migrate to What's This? help?
Well, "field-level context-sensitive help" is really just another term for
"What's This?" help. But the bottom line is that yes, you can have
field-level help topics with HTML Help.
