Re: UN*X Help

["Banttari, Ananda" <ABanttari -at- SDSI -dot- COM>]

        David Slonosky says:

> I was curious as to the current methods of help delivery for UNIX
> systems, and to the degree of variation between flavors of UNIX.
> Here's the current rough list I've made up. Any additions or
> corrections
> to this list would be appreciated.
>
> 1. man format
> 2. info format
> 3. HTML-based help
> 4. Solaris Answerbook(?)
>
We use MainSoft's MainWin software to convert our WinHelp into a
UNIX-compatible format. It's the same software that we use to convert
our Windows program to run on UNIX (Solaris 2.5 and HPUX 10.20). Our
Help on UNIX looks and feels pretty much like our Help on Windows. It
does handle pop-up windows and similar links. There are a couple of
snazzy bells and whistles we'd like to add to our Help system that we
can't do because of something in MainSoft's implementation of WinHelp,
but other than that it has worked fine (at least for the Help; our
engineers have found a number of bugs in MainWin). It's probably not the
best solution -- it *is* expensive -- but where there's one product,
there should be more, and your engineering department might have similar
software anyway if they port their code from Windows to UNIX.

--Ananda Banttari
Technical Writer, SDS
ananda -at- sdsi -dot- com