Help files

One of the tasks I need to finish up for my public release is to complete my help file. I put together a rudimentary help file for the beta version with just enough topics for each dialog in my application, but I need to better document the program and its functionality.

For my help documentation, I'm using a compiled help file (CHM) which is a common standard for help files. It basically takes a bunch of html files and compiles them into one help document which has a table of contents, index and search feature in a left-hand pane and the content in the right-hand pane.

At my old job, we used RoboHelp to create our chm files. I like RoboHelp. It has a great WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editor and makes creating help files as easy as using Microsoft Word. But... it costs $999. I don't like it that much. I was even considering just creating HTML files for my help topics and opening them in the user's browser so I could avoid paying for a Help authoring tool.

But then I discovered Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop. It's this bare bones utility that does not have a WYSIWYG editor and is not as intuitive to use asRoboHelp, but it is free. And it does everything I need to create a CHM file that I can call from my code to pull up specific topics, as well as create an index and table of contents the way I want.

Since it wasn't intuitive to use, I relied on this great tutorial someone wrote on how to set up a help file for a sample C# application. It gives you the code for the sample application and talks about not only using HTML Help Workshop to create a CHM file that you can call from your application, but also covers other types of help, such as status bar messages and tool tips.

Guess I should get back to actually writing my help documentation rather than writing about it.