Doc-To-Help

From TechWriter Wiki

Doc-To-Help is a package that essentially takes Microsoft Word documents and creates HTML Help files based on these. At its core, Doc-To-Help is simply a set of Visual Basic for Applications macros that read the content of the Word document and write out an equivalent Help file. In early versions of the product you could actually see the macros working, scrolling through the document and extracting the text, until the vendor discovered how to stop screen refreshes until they were done.

Doc-To-Help relies on the Word document being properly (and more importantly consistently) formatted with the correct styles. The macros look for certain styles to drive the structure and content of the HTML Help file. In its early versions, Doc-To-Help relied on the use of Word's built-in styles (Header 1, Header 2, etc.), but this has improved in later versions, and users can map their own styles to the HTML-required styles.

Originally, Doc-To-Help could only create 'standard' Windows Help (WinHelp) files, but now it can create WinHelp, HTML Help (which superseded WinHelp), JavaHelp, and (the vendor claims) even print documentation - although why you would want to do this when you have the original Word document anyway is a mystery.

Doc-to-Help has jumped on the 'single-sourcing' bandwagon, and allows multiple versions of help to be created from a single source file, by the use of conditional text. But again, this has to be set up carefully in the source document before the conversion macros are run.

One of the strengths of Doc-To-Help is its concept of a 'project', which pulls together all of the elements that are to go into the final Help Files. This is normally one or more Word documents, but can include images and other files. These can be pulled from different directories, meaning that it is no longer necessary to copy all required files to a single directory before starting work. Topics can be ordered, indexed, and categorized in the project file.

It is possible to perform additional edits to or 'tweaking' of the generated Help files, but this is generally not a good idea (if the edits can be made in the source document) as these 'post-conversion' changes would need to be repeated every time every time Help file is regenerated (depending on how the project side of things works).

With any conversion from Word to Help, the bulk of the work is in cleaning up the source documents (assuming that they already exist) prior to the generation of the Help files. If the documents are clean then the conversion should be very quick.

Doc-To-Help was originally produced by WexTech, but is now produced by ComponentOne (www.componentone.com).