James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
RoboHelp HTML unsurprisingly allows you to create HTML Help files, but also Web Help (a HTML-help style window for viewing from a browser), Oracle Help, and JavaHelp. The main screen is split into two. The tabbed left pane allows you to explore your project, create and edit the TOC and Index entries, as well as glossary items. The right hand pane is mainly used for editing the html files, and providing a detailed explorer-style list of files.
The integrated HTML editor provides practically all the features of FrontPage, including continuous spell checking (even with a UK dictionary!) and help-specific items such as for inserting HTML Help components. For HTML experts amongst us, you can still edit the HTML source, and if you don't like the built in editor, you can specify an external one. The editor also integrates well with the CSS style sheet editor, although does not allow you to edit the CSS source directly (though of course, you can still remotely open the file using notepad). Full hotspot editing is included, as well as tables, dynamic HTML effects, popup windows etc.
Once you have written your topics, it is a simple matter to create the table of contents, and then the index pages. Managing your Help file is also made easy, using the Project pane that provides access to a range of categories including html files, urls, broken links, images, help windows, style sheets, and context help files.
The next stage, as always is compiling your program, and yet again, RoboHelp Office makes this very easy. RoboHelp will compile your files, outputting data to a window reporting any errors it occurs. RoboHelp's 'Single Source' functionality makes it easy to produce documentation in compiled, printed and web (online help on a website) format all from a single project, without any changes being needed.
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