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Currently I'm in a redesign of an old Windows-Desktop-Application. One goal of the redesign is to implement a modern looking UI in Office2010-Style with Ribbons.
Additional to our UI we want to implement a modern looking online-help. Currently we use Microsoft HTML Help (*.chm). But it even looks a bit stale.
I did now some research which help-systems are currently used by Microsoft:

  • Microsoft AP Help (*.h1s)
  • Microsoft Help 2.x (*.hxs)
  • Microsoft Help Viewer 1.x / Help 3.0 (*.mshc)

My problem is, that I don't found any information if one of these systems is intended to be destributed with independent applications.

Which help-system would you prefer for a modern future-oriented application? I'm thankful for every tip or experince.

Michael
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  • Are you writing all the docs by hand, or is there a tool like doxygen involved? – Matt Dec 21 '11 at 13:47
  • The docs are written by an external company, which is specialized in writing docs. I don't know which software they are using but they one which is possible to generate the help as well as the handbooks in pdf. I don't see any limitations at this point, because they will provide the docs in the required format. – Michael Dec 21 '11 at 14:49
  • @Michael, [this thread](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/microsoft/Help-Authoring/32082115/microsoft-document-explorer-2008.aspx) might interest you. It's from 2008, but looks authoritative enough, and to my knowledge Document Explorer is still neither a standalone product nor a redistributable package. – Frédéric Hamidi Dec 21 '11 at 14:57
  • Well, none is too much, Borland/Embarcadero is afaik distributing htmlhelp2 with Delphi. But indeed, even the products for these new helpsystems seem all geared towards office or VS integration, not general purpose apps – Marco van de Voort Dec 22 '11 at 10:18

1 Answers1

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There are various "single source" documentation tools available that enable you to publish the same content to a variety of formats. Some popular ones (in no particular order) are Author-it, MadCap Flare, Help + Manual, and RoboHelp.

Support for the the more modern Microsoft help formats does exist, but Microsoft seems to have been somewhat slow in opening them up to other vendors. If you expect the users of your application to have internet access, another approach is to publish the help as HTML pages on a web server and link directly to those from your application. This has the advantage that you can update the help independently of the software (e.g. in response to customer queries), and some systems allow clients to participate in the help development by posting feedback to the site.

Matthew Strawbridge
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  • Thanks for your answer. But the problem I have, is not how to generate the docs for a specific system. As we use a service provider for that, we'll get what we want. The problem is more to find the suitable system, that is opened for use by other vendors. – Michael Dec 22 '11 at 09:35
  • Have you asked your service provider what output formats they can produce? They probably standardise on one of these applications and might not be able to generate all the formats listed in your question (or, at least, might charge extra to do so). – Matthew Strawbridge Dec 22 '11 at 09:56