Re: Online help tools

[Grant <rowan@xxxxxxxx>]

Having struggled mightily with RoboHell, I too went with ForeHelp.
It's not perfect, but the areas in which it fails most painfully are
the same ones that every HAT I have tried fails, most notably in
terms of styles and style handling.  Other than that, I think it is a
really nice and reliable tool.

They were starting to play up to Framers at the most recent
WinWriters conference (a great conference!), and so may be working on
some features to enhance the connection between these two tools.
NOTE: This is purely speculation on my part -- I heard no commitment
to this other than the fact that they were very interested in talking
to Frame users at the conference.

I also used HWA (now HyperText Suite)  which is an excellent product
handicapped by lack of programming resources, but which has some
features nobody else has.  (see http://www.olsonsoft.nz)

One hint.. I have found that the easiest wa to get text over from FM
to FH is to cut and paste using a temporary intermediary file.  I use
a really nice freeware tool called Stratuspad to do this, as it
produces clean RTF.

Grant
=============================================================
At 09:14 AM 3/22/99 -0800, Jim Stauffer wrote:
>A question for you well-experienced help authors:
>
>I’m about to embark on my first online help project. Being a
>small company, I had no experienced users to consult so I spent
>a week cruising the web and trying various demo’s. I was looking
>for something that would be quick to learn and capable of
>various output formats.
>
>I ended up advising my employer to buy Forefront’s ForeHelp (and
>got it at a bargain price throught provantage.com). I didn’t
>like RoboHelp’s RTF-based, tied-to-Word architecture. And
>Forefront’s customer support seems superior. I’ve never seen any
>comments about this product on this forum. Can anyone opine as
>to whether I made the right decision or not?
>
>Thanks
>
>-- 
>Jim Stauffer
>Tech Writer
>ArrayComm, Inc.
>San Jose, CA
>http://www.arraycomm.com


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