On 29 Apr 2014, at 19:52, Gordon Apple <g...@ed4u.com> wrote: > We would like to get a recommendation on the best way to generate a help > system for a fairly complex application. We started by using a simple web > view and created about 120 screens in BBEdit, mostly drill-down outlines. > Unfortunately, this has been proven to be difficult to maintain. We¹ve > looked into web generators like RapidWeaver, Freeway, and even Dreamweaver, > but all of these have been described as ³roach motels² where you enter but > can never leave. > > We would like to have both local and web-based or web-updated content and > have contextual help. This all brings us to Apple¹s ³Help Book², which seems > to have been around forever and presents its own learning curve. So the > question is: Is this the way to go? It it still current? What are the > experiences in using it?
At its core, a help book is just HTML, with a few extra tags thrown in. So I'd recommend that. That said, if you're looking for a tool to generate such help, that's your answer as well. Pick anything that spits out HTML and lets you add the required extra tags. This includes all web programming languages, i.e. I worked on a project where we ran the PHP command line tool over a bunch of PHP files and generated plain HTML files suitable for use with Apple Help from that. These days you'd probably go with Ruby or so. Cheers, -- Uli Kusterer "The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..." http://www.zathras.de _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
