What help file format should be used for help.x?

[BenjaminKalytta]

After experimenting with rtf files a bit, i found out that rtf files are not as suitable as I thought because formating text is a bit tricky, especially if more advanced features like tables, horizontal lines are used.

What do you think, is this enough for you, or should I use another file format?

Please note, html files require that each image is stored separately.

Benjamin

[prathapml]

CHM is the best format. You know... the type of help files found in "C:\Windows\Help" folder.

CHM is basically HTML and images connected together. The tools needed to make a HTML guide into CHM is free. If you need me to do the conversion, I'm available.

Keep up WIHU, its fantastic!

[XPect]

Good question, difficult answer...

For example, I'm trying to implement registry tweaks thru wihu. This means that I will have nearly 100 help files where I woud like to have a nice presentation including icons.

With HTML files, I will be oblige to manage hundreds of separate picts, not very convenient.

With RTF files, I could do a regtweaks folder with:

-UI-ContextMenu-CopyTo.reg

-UI-ContextMenu-CopyTo-Undo.reg

-UI-ContextMenu-CopyTo.rtf

That is more convenient to manage, so I'll prefer RTF than HTML

The Prathapml suggestion on .chm files is a good one, but such files are more difficult to create. I can easily create RTF with wordpad or word, but I need another soft to create chm.

Also on some machines, I experiment problem displaying chm contents, I've not found why yet, but such files seem to be more sensible to IE settings.

So right now, even if RTF is more restricted, my preference goes here.

[BenjaminKalytta]

Hmm, you know help.x is for WIHU short description which may be set for individual software items. I don't know if each one here whos actually using WIHU is able to create CHM files. But of course I also thought about this format.

Another difficult could be to display or render this file. I know how to diaplays html content without it's browser, but Im currently don't know if CHM content can be displayed without it's own help browser, despite the fact that is native html format.

Some words to RTF: RTF format as it is is definitely able to use such special features I mentioned above, but only new versions of MS Word is able to load this. Default riched20.dll isn't capable to do this. That's the problem here.

Of course I could create an own format, an own editor and so on, but I think that would be a bit waste of time

Benjamin

Edited September 26, 2004 by BenjaminKalytta