HTML Help Workshop; creating the *.chm file

Question

I'm about to create the documentation for a large LabVIEW
automation project. I would also like to use this
documentation as the content for my help-file used by the
LabVIEW program (a *.chm or a *.hlp-file) via the
Control Online Help.VI.
The question is, what is the most optimal way to create this document,
without having to do the job almost twice ?
Normally I would create the documentation as a Word-document.
But as far as I see, the help-file system has to be created by the
MS HTML Help Workshop program, and that uses a large collection
of html-files to compile into the CHM file. And the html-files that
can be exported from Word aren't optimal, are they, with
a lot of extra code etc...
Somebody have obvious
ly looked at this problem before me.
What are the tips, tricks and suggestions around ?
Martin

Answer 1

For everbody else in the audience, check out
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/ht
ml/vsconHH1Start.asp to download the free HTML help workshop. It is a
package which takes a set of HTML files and generates a standard win2k/XP
helpfile.
However, your point is completely true: it just a major pain to make a
"pretty" version of both offline and online help. Both documents can have
the same content: a section explaining each menu item, several sections to
explain common tasks, a section explaining terms, etc. I dont see a huge
difference in usability as long as you create a union of material.
As for exporting I haven't found a good solution. As you've seen, you must
have the seperate HTML files for the help compiler. That's how the table of
contents, etc is generated. For my current project, I maintain that as a
frontpage web and apply a cascading style sheet. I didn't find a good way to
(automatically) split the word document into several HTML files or join the
frontpage web into a single organized word file. It wasn't a huge issue,
because I ended up using printed material as an installation guide and
online help as program documentation.
The one particularily useful thing was programming a custom "document my
progam" VI which exports using my special documentation format. Of course
that is really only suitable for the programmer's reference section. However
I really, really, really hated using Print -> VI documentation and
reformatting every time. I'm sure you'll soon notice that it gets tiring.
-joey
"CatLabMan" wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> I'm about to create the documentation for a large LabVIEW
> automation project. I would also like to use this
> documentation as the content for my help-file used by the
> LabVIEW program (a *.chm or a *.hlp-file) via the
> Control Online Help.VI.
>
> The question is, what is the most optimal way to create this document,
> without having to do the job almost twice ?
>
> Normally I would create the documentation as a Word-document.
> But as far as I see, the help-file system has to be created by the
> MS HTML Help Workshop program, and that uses a large collection
> of html-files to compile into the CHM file. And the html-files that
> can be exported from Word aren't optimal, are they, with
> a lot of extra code etc...
>
> Somebody have obviously looked at this problem before me.
>
> What are the tips, tricks and suggestions around ?
>
> Martin
>
>