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Subject:FTS in WinHelp: All is not as it seems! From:Patrick O'Connell <patricko -at- EICON -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 22 Mar 1994 11:47:00 PST
My apologies to everyone who saw parts I and II of my FTS-in-WinHelp
postings, immediately went looking for index-building tools on their local
copies of the Win32 SDK CD-ROM, and didn't find any. I myself have examined
three different versions of this CD, and found nothing but the usual 16-bit
Help development tools.
I took on faith what Paul Dempsey, who I hasten to add is simply a tech
writer at MS, NOT an official MS representative, told me, in part because he
was quite specific about the name of the directory containing the tools, and
even some of the filenames. I am NOT saying Paul is a liar, merely that it
seems to be very difficult to find the version of the CD he was talking
about. I will contact Paul and ask him to post publicly anything else he
knows that could help everybody who's interested track down the volume in
question.
Also, with respect to using Viewer to generate .IND files: according to Jack
Deland,
"Odd that a separate .IND file would be used with NT (seems like a step
backwards, since V_i_e_w_e_r_ 2_._0 i_n_t_e_r_n_a_l_i_z_e_s t_h_i_s)."
I.e., sounds like you can only use Viewer 1.0 to generate .IND files, not
version 2.0. In other words, if you don't own a copy of Viewer 1.0 and you
can't get a hold of this mysterious NT SDK platter, insofar as using FTS in
Help for 16-bit Windows OR for NT you're pretty much screwed. By the way,
from what our MMDK 1.0 license says we can freely redistribute the FTS DLLS
as long as we give them credit, and AS LONG AS WE DISTRIBUTE THEM WITH
SOMETHING. It doesn't say that something has to be a Viewer file (YESSSSS!).
If you have the same package, please read your licensing agreement, see what
conclusions you come to, and let me know. Thanks.
I must say that given MS's traditional laissez-faire attitude towards
technical communicators, and what seems to be an unofficial policy of
technocracy, this doesn't surprise me.
