Re: Robohelp vs. HDK

[Steve Fouts <stefou -at- ESKIMO -dot- COM>]

Foster, Betsy <BFoster -at- msmail -dot- hsii -dot- ccare -dot- com> wrote in article
<52pcco$2qq -at- news -dot- cis -dot- okstate -dot- edu>...
[snip]
| I am responsible for choosing an online help authoring tool.
[snip 2]
| I've narrowed the choices to Robohelp 95 and HDK.  I'd appreciate the
| pros and cons of both programs.

My single biggest complaint about Robohelp was that it required MS Word.
Given a typical help development scenario, my machine would have to have
the following programs running at the same time:

        Robohelp
        MS Word Resource hog that it is.
        Paint Shop      Screen captures, button snags, yadda yadda yadda.
        Extra!  We have a mainframe. Most PC apps that we develop
                        require it. It isn't too tiny itself.
        The App When I'm working with it, it is probably in debug
                        mode with a footprint about 5x what it'll be in
                        production.
        What else?      At odd times the help compiler, shed editor, any
                        one of the cool utilities that come with Robohelp.
                        My calendar manager. Perhaps a news reader.

Even a fairly hot Pentium with a good deal of RAM groans under such
a load.

On the plus side, the WinHelp Office has a whole suite of utilites
(a lot of them used to be shareware and still kind of feel that
way) that are pretty helpful.

We've pretty much switched to ForeHelp.

Steve
stefou -at- eskimo -dot- com