How to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain

How to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain I heard about Dr.Explain only recently. It’s a great layout and text editor for creating all kinds of technical manuals and help files. Especially for dedicated MS Word users, it offers a wealth of options, including the ability to capture automatically-annotated screenshots that even RoboHelp…

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What Should Today's Ideal Help (User Assistance) Format Look Like?

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Alan Porter of WebWorks help authoring software has released a new white paper titled “Delivering Help for Today’s Web” which can be ordered from aporter@webworks.com Porter raises a number of important issues that I’ve also been thinking about for some time. It’s true that yesterday’s static help file system is losing…

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A Free Help File Software: HelpNDoc

© 2010 Ugur Akinci My readers know my fondness for Adobe RoboHelp for creating help files. But for those who cannot afford RoboHelp there are some free alternatives out there like HelpNDoc; free at least for personal use. If you need to use these programs commercially you may need to pay a small licensing fee,…

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Compare Help Authoring Tools with HAT-Matrix

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Here is an interesting web site to compare your favorite HATs (Help Authoring Tools): HAT-Matrix The site has 2 drawbacks: 1) Only those vendors who paid to be on the site are represented (WebWorks, for example, is missing). 2) The owners of the site rely on the vendors’ own product descriptions…

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A Basic "RoboHelp 8 for Word" Tutorial

© 2010 Ugur Akinci A. Introduction This introductory Adobe RoboHelp tutorial shows the basic steps required to create a RoboHelp 8 for Word project. (Robohelp comes in two basic flavors: Robohelp for Word, and plain Robohelp HTML). In this tutorial, we will use RoboHelp 8 for Word and generate a  Help file in Winhelp 2000…

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