Recommendation for Help Authoring Tool

Question

Hi there,

I am seeking recommendations for Help authoring tools.

Our requirements:

- integrates well with WPF user interface and builds a minimal template for our end user documentation.  we have strong end user expertise on our project this year, and they are willing to invest time in building good comprehensive end user documentation.

- our context help has to be very strong, because we are doing a best effort towards making our application accessible to persons with disabilities.  If the tool integrates well the overall end user documentation with the context sensitive help, this would simplify maintenance for us.

- We are aware of tools like sandcastle for doing our API documentation, is there a more recent tool that is widely recommended?

Our shop also has some legacy systems that are on the java platform, and they were considering using something called Help and Manual.   So if we can find something that addresses both platforms, this would be a bonus (though we are not expecting this to be likely!)

Have a great day,

Theresa

Answer 1

Hi Theresa,

You could try our Help Generator for Visual Studio. It generates template pages and automatically links them to your WPF forms. You can replace the generated design time pages by pages generated with the Help Capture tool, which you can use on your applications run-time.  Whether it will be sufficiently context sensitive for your audience I can't say. It may be worth the try. It does not explicitly support the Java platform in the sense that you can't have pages generated and automatically linked but you can use the product as full-fledged help authoring tool.

Mark