Re: Can Dreamweaver be used for chm or WinHelp help file generation?

message from Pete Lees on 15 Jul 2004

Randall,

Recent versions of Word can produce fairly clean HTML if you choose to
save the documents as "Web Page, Filtered", and for Word 2000 there is
a downloadable filter that strips out all the Office-specific markup,
but I'd definitely agree that in general it's better to use something
other than Word to create HTML documents.

I don't use RoboHelp, but I believe that you can now configure it to
use your preferred HTML editor rather than its own built-in editor.
Also, you may want to check out these two tools:

Deva Tools for Dreamweaver: http://www.devahelp.com
Help Publisher for FrontPage & Dreamweaver: http://www.indigoware.com

However, I don't believe that either tool is designed to output
print-ready material.

For compiled HTML Help (.chm) files, the index keywords are either
embedded in the source HTML files using <object> tags or stored in a
separate index (.hhk) file. It's possible to keep all the topics
together in a single HTML file -- see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/vsconsplitovr.asp
from Microsoft's documentation for HTML Help Workshop -- but much more
common to split them into multiple HTML files, one for each topic.

There are quite a number of help authoring tools around that should
meet your single-sourcing requirement, even if most force you to use
their own editing facilities. For information on the more popular
ones, see:

http://www.helpstuff.com/helpstuff.html#hats
http://www.mshelpwiki.com/index.php?page=SoftwareReviews
http://www.cherryleaf.com/which_hat_(help_authoring_tool _should_I_buy.htm

Archived message: Re: Can Dreamweaver be used for chm or WinHelp help file generation? (Macromedia Dreamweaver)