What would you look for in a Help Authoring tool? Well, if so far, you have compared help authoring tools based on their WYSIWYG editing capability, then you might reconsider your preferences. We are not saying that WYSIWYG is not desirable. But look at it from the angle of "WYSIWYG at what cost?" For instance, if you get a WYSIWYG tool that doesn't automatically generate and use context strings for hyper links, it can be a real pain to use. You would be tempted to minimize the number of links to avoid this painful procedure and your help file is going to suffer. In any kind of authoring, the text presentation comes last. There are many, many other hurdles to cross which are more difficult and tiring than the text presentation and beautification. WYSIWYG tools focus on the text presentation aspects rather than on help authoring or project features.Read this discussion and find out for yourself.

Please note that HelpHikes Pro is not a WYSIWYG system but rather, uses its own hypertext markup language, called HHML. Hence, it is able to support a number of powerful features which you may not find in the WYSIWYG systems.

Features:

• Multiple window authoring
• Direct access to a help topic
• Management of context strings
• Ease of inserting hypertext links
• Management of keywords, startup-help-macros, etc
• Managing browsing groups and sequences of topics
• Conditional compilation
• Easy to understand hypertext markup language
• Support for secondary windows
• Full support for the Windows 95 help features
• Smart build to save your time
• Fonts, colors, styles, margins, etc
• Right-click templates
• Customization features
• Error handling
• Features for programmers
• Complements other tools

Windows help presents the online help to the user, primarily in a single window. But when it comes to authoring, would you like to author in only one window?

In hypertext authoring, or in any writing activity, it helps a lot if you are able to view many of your related or unrelated topics side by side. While working on one help topic, you may suddenly feel a need to add or change another topic. Once you use the multiple-window environment of HelpHikes Pro, you'll never go back to single window authoring. Multiple window authoring helps you brainstorm your ideas. It complements the random thought processes that occur while researching or writing on any subject. What's more, HelpHikes Pro contains sophisticated features to remember open positions of topic windows. Use them to your advantage.

The use of a true multiple-window authoring environment is the real advantage of HelpHikes Pro. Don't be misled into thinking that any program which displays a Window menu is a multiple-window authoring program. It's just not enough to have multiple windows open. What is more important is that the windows should remember their relationship with each other. For example, when you close a parent folder it closes all its children and also remembers their positions. If you were to perform a close for each child, or can't find out who is the parent folder of an open topic, the program would lose all its benefits.

Serious online help often involves hundreds of topics. You should be able to quickly get to a topic. In HelpHikes Pro, you always work from the folder window that contains a list of the help topics. There are many, many features to rearrange, sort and search for the topics. To open a desired topic, you just need to double-click on it. Or, you can select multiple topics and press Enter to open all of them at once. HelpHikes Pro also contains features to remember last open positions of topics and to restore a complete desktop image of the open topics.

In the past, when writing, you might have often wished for a big desktop space where you can rearrange your open notes, look at them to get the big picture and open them automatically at the same positions next day. Well, physically this may not be possible, but HelpHikes Pro makes your computer do that for you.

This is a big task of Windows help authoring that many of the help authoring tools solve only superficially. Context strings are unique IDs which need to be assigned to your help topics (in an RTF footnote) so that these IDs can then be used in the HyperText jumps. Superficial help authoring tools will only give you a dialog box to enable entry of the context-RTF-footnote in the topic. But it's you who must think up and assign context string to the topic and it's you who must remember it when adding a jump-RTF-footnote for a hypertext link to this topic across your whole document. This can be a nightmare.

What we need is a total freedom from the management of context strings. HelpHikes Pro does everything for you transparently. It assigns and manages the context strings for you based on your topic names. In fact, many HelpHikes Pro users may not even know the existence of context strings. It works like magic. Also, if ever a need arises for you to force the context string of a topic to a string of your choice, you can do that too. No restrictions.

A hypertext link generally jumps to another topic. But it can also display the other topic in a popup window or in a secondary window, may cause a jump to another help file, may execute another program by a help macro and so on. With many help authoring tools, you need to know the context string of the topic you are jumping to. Not so with HelpHikes Pro. With it, the most used jump and popup links can be inserted by just a drag and drop of the topic name from the folder on to an open topic window. Or, you can copy a jump statement to the clipboard from the folder or from an open topic window and paste it into a topic. For other types of links, HelpHikes Pro provides its own logical statements that can be quickly typed or inserted in the topic text using the right-click WhizMenu.

With many help authoring tools, at most you might get a dialog to enter keyword-RTF-footnotes and macro-RTF-footnotes in the topic text. It is very inconvenient in a word-processor if you need to compare keywords of two different topics by looking at their footnotes. Not so with HelpHikes Pro. It gives you a [~wKeyWordsHere ...] statement to insert arbitrary keywords in the topic text.

HelpHikes Pro gives you another more logical way where you can keep all the keywords or macros of the related topics close to each other. This is done in an object oriented manner by treating a topic as a HelpTopic object and treating the keywords and macros as attributes of that object. You simply code a HelpTopic statement for a topic and assign the keywords, macros and other attributes to it. Even if you don't assign, there are convenient defaults. For example, the program always defines one keyword for the topic that is same as the topic name. You keep the HelpTopic statements for a group of topics together, in a special separate topic. There are also features to quickly locate a HelpTopic statement for a topic if you want random access to the attributes. A HelpTopic statement also lets you assign other useful options of a topic, all in one place and in free-format text.

Let me give you another example of this object oriented concept. In Winhelp, you can define secondary windows and cause a topic to be displayed in a secondary window when performing a hypertext jump. But suppose, you always want to display a topic in a particular secondary window whenever it is jumped to. In other authoring tools, you may be required to change each and every jump to that topic in your document. In HelpHikes Pro, it's simple. Just assign a jumpWin attribute in the HelpTopic statement for the topic. Then HelpHikes Pro will always code a jump to that topic such that it uses that secondary window. Isn't it wonderful?

This is another task that should be handled in a logical manner. You should be able to make one or more groups of topics so that a person reading the help for a group can be guided by the browse buttons through all the topics in that group. A superficial tool may only help you to enter a browse-RTF-footnote with a dialog. It's you who must assign and keep track of group and sequence IDs. The process is so tiresome that many authors tend not to use this useful aspect of help authoring.

HelpHikes Pro allows you to form groups by simply a drag and drop of the topic names to form special objects called ListBrowseGroup statements. It is very simple to manage all your browse groups with the ease of a drag and drop and the free-format text editing to rearrange the topic names.

HelpHikes Pro has its own conditional compilation features which are superior to the build tags provided by the help compiler. Not only does HelpHikes Pro allow you to combine separate topics for a compilation, it also allows you to mark text-blocks in your topics that are present, not present or are different in a particular version of help. Very useful for maintaining a demo and a production version of online help from the same folder.

HelpHikes Pro gives you its own hypertext markup language (we'll call it HHML). If you know HTML used for web authoring, you already have an idea of how hypertext markup languages work. HelpHikes Pro also gives you a smart customizable popup menu to conveniently enter HHML statements.

Here's an example of an HHML statement: to make a text-block bold, you select the text-block, press right menu button and click Bold on the popup menu that appears. This encloses the selected text in a [~bold ...] HHML statement. Instead of using the menu, you could also type in the statement. No restrictions.

When you generate help, the text appears as bold in your generated help. Similarly, there are HHML statements to make the text italic; to insert a bitmap in your text; to insert nested bulleted or numeric lists, and so on. There are several advantages of using such markup languages.

Secondary windows are important elements of serious online help. HelpHikes Pro supports secondary windows along with all the new features available in the new HCW compiler and the Windows 95 help.

HelpHikes Pro fully supports all the aspects of using the new HCW compiler to create the Windows 95 help. Also, its .CNT or Contents generation feature is more convenient than even the graphical interface of HCW. Why? Because, you don't need to know the context strings and can use the same JUMP statements when building a .CNT file.

HelpHikes Pro provides a unique option, Smart build, that is similar to make or IDE project concepts known to C programmers. If you select this option and make a change in your help topics, it finds out whether it needs to build RTF for the whole help from the beginning or just create RTF for the changed topic. This feature will save you lots of time when authoring help files.

In HelpHikes Pro, there are HHML statements for all these features. What's more, you can define your own link statements if you don't find it in the HHML set. For example, if you want to code a link that shows a given bitmap as a hotspot but when activated, executes a given help macro, there is no HHML statement to do that. But the powerful RtfLinkMacro feature of HelpHikes Pro lets you define a new type of jump statement that does the job. The examples are available in the sample WZN files given with HelpHikes Pro.

A smart right-click menu tool, WhizMenu, allows you to quickly enter the HHML markup statements. This text template feature is customizable so that you can make your own menu items to insert text as large as a whole topic. It can also do smart insertions of the selected text as per your template. You can also make other such menus for other purposes such as for HTML authoring. A sample is included with HelpHikes Pro. In fact, I do all of my HTML authoring with WhizMenu.

Whatever help authoring tool you use, you'll always want to customize some features to your liking. HelpHikes Pro provides a number of customization features ranging from simple to complex.

• You can add your own HHML statements by using RtfMacros.
• The real power of RtfMacros feature is evident in the fact that you can use other RtfMacros in the definition of an RtfMacro recursively.
• Also, to give you even more power, an RtfLinkMacro feature allows you to make your own Jump statements for any degree of customization.
• If you find that you must use a WYSIWYG editor to add certain text formatting features which aren't possible with HHML, you can edit the intermediate RTF file by the WYSIWYG editor to put in the changes and run the BAT file to compile the RTF file.
• If you need to change the HPJ file for any reason, you can add special topics in your folder that can replace, can add to or can create a new HPJ section in the project file. In addition, you can also specify an external HPJ file to be used for help compilation.
• The popup menu feature, WhizMenu, that allows you to enter HHML statements, can be customized to add more HHML statements that you create or want to change entry of. You can even use it for HTML authoring by creating a menu file for HTML.
• For the new Windows based help compiler, you can set up some switches in the INI file.
• You may want to reuse substantial portion of your help text for the printed manual. For this, please don't use the RTF file that is generated for help compilation. Instead use the menu Tools-Export non-help RTF to export a clean looking RTF file that doesn't contain hypertext related footnotes.
• Foreign language users get features to ensure that correct RTF or OEM character set is generated in their RTF and HPJ files. In most cases, this is done automatically by HelpHikes Pro. They can also specify a different Contents topic name by GlobalHelpOptions.

A help authoring tool should be able to catch hypertext-link errors when creating the RTF for help compilation. If it doesn't, you're likely to see a huge error listing from your help compiler that is difficult to resolve. HelpHikes Pro catches most of your errors when creating RTF and open your topics at the proper position so that you can quickly correct the error and proceed. By using smart-build, along with this smart error positioning, your help compilation will be about as painless as it can be.

If you're generating online help to be used by a program, you'd like to get a header file containing all the context numbers of the generated context strings. Also, if you're using a language other than C, you'd like to convert this header file to your own programming language. HelpHikes Pro has all those features and it also supports overriding the default context numbers and their range.

Even if you want to use other WYSIWYG word-processors/tools to improve the appearance of your help text, you can do that. It's always better to research and write your help document with HelpHikes Pro. Later, you can edit the intermediate RTF and HPJ files created by HelpHikes Pro by using other word processors and can enhance your help document. HelpHikes Pro does not restrict you in any way.

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