Choosing a Help Format

[Fei Min Lorente]

Thanks, Jeremy. You're helpful as always.

More clarification: we're planning to just set up a button or a menu item in the VS-based user interface that triggers the help system, and the help system will run in its own application not in VS, so we shouldn't be forced to use MS Help Viewer.

And we weren't worried about OmniHelp losing files; we are worried about users going in and messing with them. Is there any way to lock them down?

We're very curious about using standalone Eclipse Help; has anyone here used it for a non-Eclipse-based product? If not, I'll take this question to the eclipse_tw group.

Fei Min

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy H. Griffith [mailto:jeremy at omsys.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 3:58 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Cc: Fei Min Lorente
Subject: Re: Choosing a Help Format

On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 18:41:52 +0000, Fei Min Lorente <FeiMin.Lorente at onsemi.com> wrote:

>I've got documentation in structured FrameMaker 10 and Mif2Go. I've produced Eclipse Help routinely in the past, but for the first time, we're creating a user interface in Visual Studio. We want to integrate the Help so that a button or menu item in the UI will open a Help window, complete with a table of contents and search facility. An index would be nice, and context-sensitive links to the documentation would be nice, but are lower priority.

If you want it to run within VS, you have only one choice:
the current MS Help Viewer.  The support group for it is <MSHelpViewer at yahoogroups.com>; Rob Chandler runs it.  We have current customers producing it with Mif2Go.

More links to resources for it in the User's Guide, par. 7.1.1, "Considering Help-system features".

And I wouldn't worry about OmniHelp "losing files", LOL!
That use of small files is what makes it way faster than the alternatives.  None ever get lost.  ;-)

But really, Help Viewer is the only one that works within VS as you want.  MS has made very sure of that.  <g>

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>    http://mif2go.com/