Product Reviews

Few serious developers would be without a help-authoring tool. The venerable WinHelp format is created by inserting arcane footnote codes into a Microsoft Word document. This is then exported as Rich Text Format and finally becomes source code for the Microsoft Help compiler. Working with this in the raw isn't much fun. Once compiled, WinHelp works well, but it isn't cross-platform and for some years there's been an obvious need for something more Web-friendly to replace it. However, the industry hasn't reached any consensus on what it should be.

Microsoft's solution is compiled HTML Help, but take-up has been patchy and its poor implementation in Office 2000 hasn't helped it to win many friends. Other solutions include straight HTML, HTML combined with Java or ActiveX components to provide features such as full-text search, various implementations of Java help, or Adobe PDF. Of all these, the best and most responsive for context-sensitive help in Windows applications remains WinHelp, so the old friend refuses to go away.

Confronted with this over-abundance of formats, the leading help-authoring tool vendors have done their best to support as many as possible. RoboHELP Office 9 is from eHelp, formerly known as Blue Sky Software. It includes two products also available separately. RoboHELP Classic is for WinHelp authoring. RoboHELP HTML is for creating Microsoft HTML Help, Sun's JavaHelp, Oracle's Java-based help, or an uncompiled HTML format unique to RoboHELP and called WebHelp. WebHelp is really straightforward HTML, supplemented by various scripts and Java applets in order to provide extra functionality, and runs on a broad range of platforms and browsers.

RoboHELP Classic

RoboHELP Classic is an add-on for Microsoft Word. When you run it, two applications are tiled side-by-side on screen. On the right is Word itself, supplemented with a RoboHELP menu and toolbar. On the left is RoboHELP Explorer, a tree view of the project which supports right-click, pop-up menus for easy access to its features.

RoboHELP has plenty of Wizards and short-cuts, so that you don't need to know the obscure codes required to make a Help file compile correctly, but the Word add-on approach does have some inherent weaknesses. There's nothing to stop you deleting some critical element and ending up with broken links, and it isn't altogether clear which features of Word will work correctly when compiled to on-line help. By contrast, ForeFront's ForeHelp product, which doesn't require Word, has the look and feel of a read-write Help file - safer and more intuitive.

Where Word should come into its own is when you want to generate both on-line help and a printed manual from the same source. This is a speciality of WexTech's Doc-To-Help, another Word-based help authoring tool, but it isn't well handled in RoboHELP. For example, you can't automatically convert jumps or see-also references to page-number cross-references suitable for print.

In other respects, this

ADVERTISEMENT

is a complete and flexible tool. The Explorer is an excellent navigation tool, and there's full support for advanced help features. There's a dialog for building macros, and you can generate map files for all the main development languages. WinHelp 2000 is a custom extension that supports a multipaned Help window with an Explorer view showing at run-time, thus looking similar to Microsoft HTML Help, while still using the WinHelp engine. Although this is primarily a tool for WinHelp, you can also generate WebHelp or JavaHelp, as long as you have the full RoboHELP Office.

RoboHELP HTML

Most of eHelp's energies have gone into the HTML side of the package. Unlike RoboHELP Classic, the HTML version has its own built-in editor, or you can integrate it with external tools such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or HomeSite. The built-in editor has both wysiwyg and source code views, which is handy for those who prefer to edit raw HTML. Like RoboHELP Classic, there's a Project Explorer window always-on view.

When you start a new project, you specify a target type, choosing between Microsoft's HTML Help, WebHelp, JavaHelp, Oracle's version of JavaHelp, or one of several general templates such as 'Corporate Intranet' and 'On-line Book'. These latter options suggest that RoboHELP is aiming to produce for generic Web site development as well as a standard help-authoring tool. It's now a capable general HTML editor, although the main reason for using it is to take advantage of RoboHELP's support for key navigation features. WebHelp generates a tabbed panel offering a tree-view explorer, a keyword index, and a full-text search, which works cross-platform on a variety of browsers. The technology behind this is the usual messy mixture of Java, JavaScript and Dynamic HTML, with browser detection to determine what should be invoked for a particular client. It appears to work though, and could save time if your Web site needs that kind of support.

According to eHelp, WebHelp also supports context-sensitive help, so that the user could press F1 in an application and have the appropriate page appear in a browser. Unfortunately, this doesn't amount to much in the current product. For example, the documentation merely explains how to use the ShellExecute Windows API function to display a specific URL. It's easier under Unix, where WebHelp generates a shell script that maps help topic identifiers, known as Context IDs, to the appropriate URLs.

You can most easily support Windows applications by using Microsoft's HTML Help rather than generic WebHelp for your output. This is the most productive way to use RoboHELP HTML, since all the features needed for creating application help are built-in, including context-sensitive help and full-text search. It's easier to work with RoboHELP than with Microsoft's free HTML Help Workshop. Microsoft HTML requires Internet Explorer 5 and in its compiled form runs only on Windows.

Many of the new features in RoboHELP Office are HTML authoring features. These include full HTML 4 support, better behaviour when handling code from other editors, a colour-coded HTML view that synchronises to the wysiwyg view, a comprehensive Table editor and several instant DHTML effects. There's also support for ActiveX controls, although these complicate deployment as RoboHELP doesn't install and register the files automatically. The ability to target Oracle help is new in this version.

If you're targeting WinHelp, there isn't much new in RoboHELP 9 and rival products are more compelling. For HTML help though, RoboHELP is now excellent.