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Help News
Updated April 1, 2003

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  • April 2003

HelpLess Help System Announced

  • March 2003

West Wind HTML Help Builder 3.0 Released

  • February 2003

Doc-To-Help 6.5 with Natural Search Announced

HelpLess Help System Announced
April 1, 2003

Click here to read about an entirely different Help system. But if you don't want to, that don't make us no never mind. Just forget it then.

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West Wind HTML Help Builder 3.0 Released
Paia, Hawaii - March 10, 2003

Link: www.west-wind.com/wwHelp

West Wind Technologies proudly announces the release of West Wind HTML Help Builder 3.0. Help Builder is a complete Integrated Development Environment for building HTML Help files and online documentation for both developer oriented material and end user applications.

With its unique template driven approach that focuses on content, Help Builder makes short work of creating professional documentation for your applications quickly and consistently. Many tools and shortcut commands assist the developer in the process of creating help content as well as formatting with complete control over all aspects of documentation generation. For developers there is specific support for automatically generating documentation by importing classes from .Net Assemblies, COM objects and type libraries, Visual FoxPro classes, WSDL based Web Services and SQL Server and Visual FoxPro databases. Developers will also appreciate the fully automatable COM interface to import content and to hook Help Builder into other applications and developer environments. Help Builder also has the ability to script HTML templates using ASP-style HTML documents to generate complex dynamic output from your help topics. Output can be generated to HTML Help format (chm files), plain Web ready HTML presented in a viewer style frames view, XML and to Microsoft Word 2000 or later.

Version 3.0 adds support for directly importing .Net classes and assemblies and databases of various formats, the ability to directly capture desktop screen content, many improvements in the user interface including full support for XP themes, improved icon management for help files and many usability enhancements based on user feedback.

West Wind HTML Help Builder 3.0 is now available directly from West Wind Technologies (http://www.west-wind.com/wwstore/) for US $299.00. A free shareware version is available for download from the West Wind Web site at http://www.west-wind.com/wwhelp/.

+++ Rick ---

Rick Strahl
West Wind Technologies
http://www.west-wind.com/
http://www.west-wind.com/wwThreads

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Doc-To-Help 6.5 with Natural Search Announced

FOR RELEASE ON February 17, 2002:
ComponentOne® Announces ComponentOne Doc-To-Help® 6.5 and ComponentOne Natural Search(tm)- ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 6.5 is a new version of the popular single source Help authoring tool for Microsoft® Word®. Also available, ComponentOne Natural Search, an optional add-on module for adding natural language search functionality to Doc-To-Help Help systems. These products will be launched in March 2003, and will be available for purchase at that time.

For the complete press release, click here.

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MS Help 2.0 News from Microsoft
January 10, 2003

The Microsoft® Help team has decided not to release Microsoft Help 2 as a general Help platform. This is primarily in response to customer feedback that the most important thing is providing a standard Help experience on everybody's machine. With that in mind, we are focusing our work efforts on providing a great Help experience in the next client release of Windows (codename "Longhorn") rather than on releasing an interim solution that is not integrated with the operating system.

While Microsoft develops future Help technologies, we encourage Help authors to continue using HTML Help 1.x. Visual Studio® .NET has great support for integrating HTML Help 1.x content into the applications you build, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbconApplicationAssistance.asp. There are also many 3rd party tools available that provide a rich authoring experience for HTML Help 1.x content (for some examples, see http://www.winwriters.com/restools.htm).

The Help 2 engine will continue to be provided with several of Microsoft's developer-related products, including Visual Studio .NET, MSDN® Library, Microsoft .NET Framework SDK, and Microsoft Office Developer. Component developers and others who need to integrate their Help content into the Help system in Visual Studio .NET can do so using the Visual Studio Help Integration Kit (VSHIK). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwmscExtendingNETHelp.asp for more information. There are also 3rd party tools that provide support for Help 2, including FAR HTML (http://www.helpware.net/FAR/index.html) and ComponentOne® Doc-To-Help® (http://www.componentone.com/helptools.aspx).

Shane McRoberts
Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Help

This posting imposes no obligations upon Microsoft and is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Some of the sites listed above are not under the control of Microsoft and Microsoft makes no representations whatsoever concerning the content of those sites. These links are provided as a convenience to you. Such listings do not constitute an endorsement, authorization, sponsorship, or affiliation by Microsoft with respect to such sites, their owners, or their providers. The information, software, or products found on these sites have not been tested by Microsoft and Microsoft therefore cannot make any representations whatsoever with respect thereto.


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