Help Magician

[Earl Morton <WorkgWords -at- AOL -dot- COM>]

Bruce Byfield (byfield -at- direct -dot- ca) asked:

>>
Second, I've been asked to develop the context help and the
online manuals for my current project using Help Magician.
Although I've never used it, the program seems easy enough to
learn. However, I was wondering if anybody on the list had any
experience with it. In particular, I'm wondering if there are
any bugs or work-arounds I should know about. I notice, for
example, that it's designed for Windows 3.1--will it compile
properly under Win95? I'd hate to get too far into the project
only to find some unpleasant surprises.
<<

I've worked with Help Magician on a couple projects in the past and found it
to be rather buggy. I'm sorry I don't remember many details (it has been a
few years), but I would certainly be cautious. We eventually shifted to Help
Yourself! with which we've been very happy. One thing I do remember about
Help Magician is that the interface used lots of its own graphics rather than
standard Windows dialog boxes and so on. This made performance pretty slow.
The tech support wasn't too bad, and they were pretty responsive about
helping us work around problems, but there were more problems than there
should have been. As I said, this was a few years ago, and I have no idea if
they have cleaned up the program in the meantime, so be sure and check it
out.

Hope this helps!

Earl Morton