Upgrading FM from 7.1 to 9

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009 15:48:30 -0800, "Lea Rush" <lea at astoria-pacific.com> wrote:

>I did a comparison of RH vs. Mif2Go at the beginning of the year, and the
>biggest difference I found was that RH supported Natural Language search.
>Does Mif2Go support that, or will it?

If I understand you correctly, you are talking about WebHelp
search, right?  So you are comparing RH WebHelp with OmniHelp.
(For other Help formats, like HTML Help, search is built in so 
that it is the same regardless of the tool used.)

One difference is that OmniHelp is Open Source (LGPL), and
RH WebHelp is proprietary.  That means that with OmniHelp,
you can add any search engine you please, by modifying the
JavaScript.  It's not trivial, but it's certainly possible.

For OmniHelp, our goal is to make it very fast to respond,
because people using Help systems want to find the info they
need quickly and get on with the job they are doing.  So we
do all the search indexing at authoring time, and provide a
JavaScript array, ready to use, so that search even of large
docs is instantaneous.  That approach pretty much limits you
to keyword search (including regex), which we feel is a very
reasonable price to pay for the high speed.  We also feel that
an index, properly done, is superior to any form of search.

So we're not inclined to invest the time needed to implement
"Natural Language" search in OmniHelp ourselves.  It would
slow down searches, especially on large doc sets, dramatically, 
for a rather questionable benefit.  However, anyone who really 
wants it can certainly add it as an option, and redistribute
the result legally, which may not be possible under less 
permissive licenses.

And, of course, there are quite a few other differences that
we consider much more significant... but that's your call.  ;-)

HTH!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/