1. Tips on Online Help
Tharun Unni

2. About this Presentation
Access Points in Online Help
Life Cycle
Choosing a Delivery Format
Authoring Tool
Authoring Process
Intergrating with the Software
Platform-Specific Issues

3. Access Points in Online Help
Task-Oriented Topics
Table of Contents (TOC)
Topics
Context-Sensitive Help:
Dialog Level
Field Level (What’s This Help)
Other Modes of Access
Index
Search
Favorites

4. Life Cycle Decide the Delivery Format Choose an Authoring Tool
Use a Help Authoring Tool
Use a Publishing Tool and convert the source using the Help Authoring Tool
Follow the Documentation Life Cycle
Integration and Delivery
Platform-Specific Issues

5. Choosing a Delivery Format
Platform-Dependent (compiled)
CHM
HLP files
Platform-Independent
HTML/XML files
Applets
Images

6. Choose an Authoring Tool
HTML + Notepad + Compiler
Authoring tool
RoboHelp:
Author in RoboHelp
Convert from other sources such as Word or FrameMaker
Webworks Publisher

7. Authoring Process Typical documentation development life cycle
Building Blocks
HTML, XML, or RTF
Images
Project Files
Build or Project File (HPJ or HHP)
Table of Contents (CNT)
Index (IDX)

8. Integrating with Software
Compiled
Decide who will assign the help topic IDs
Include MAP files in the Project File
#define topic_name NUM
Authoring tool may have an automatically generate MAP File option.
If you cannot disable this, take a backup copy of your map file.

9. Platform-Specific Issues
On Unix and Linux:
filenames are case-sensitive
filename should not contain blank spaces
path is indicated by “/” and not “\”
directory access privileges should be configured
use relative path for images and URLs
Netscape is a popular browser