RE: Help in Evaluating HATs

["Bridge, Ian" <Ian -dot- Bridge -at- capita -dot- co -dot- uk>]

There's been some useful feedback on this topic. The original query also
mentioned another HAT, Author-IT, has anyone any experience using this?

It's one of the items on my 'to-do-list' from my boss, to evaluate it as
a help tool.

Ian Bridge
Procedural Change Service x1094
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+ian -dot- bridge=capita -dot- co -dot- uk -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+ian -dot- bridge=capita -dot- co -dot- uk -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Jim Morgan
Sent: 17 January 2007 16:53
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Help in Evaluating HATs

I am in the course of the same evaluation, and my test asked a very
simple
question: How close is the Help output to the original Word formatting
after
going through the most basic steps (import document into project;
identify
my custom heading styles for purpose of topic breaks; and click the
"build"
button)? Of particular interest was how the products handled the many
outline-numbered steps in the test document, a 70-page administrator
manual.

Help & Manual was not viable because of its requirement that the
document be
in RTF. Doc-to-Help produced output that looks basically like the Word
file
in Word's "Normal" view, with numbered and bulleted lists reproduced
perfectly. The minor problems seem easy to overcome. RoboHelp's output
was
an unholy mess, even after I messed with it for hours. An Adobe engineer
in
a forum blamed Word's admittedly awful code output, but I note that the
lists produced directly from Word into HTML and viewed in a browser
looked
fine, and again, Doc-to-Help had no problem working from the same source
file.

The D2H interface is not intuitive and the conditional text tool is
clumsy.
But it seems like D2H will require the fewest upfront hours, and I see
no
indication that RoboHelp will ever reproduce our lists correctly (which
have
been correctly formatted using Word list styles and thus cause few
problems
in Word).

And no, I'm not connected to any of the manufacturers!

Regards,
Jim

Jim Morgan 
Senior Technical Writer (Consultant)
Casabyte, Inc. 

Opinions are mine alone, your mileage may vary, etc.

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