Welcome to “HelpNDoc Insights and Articles”, your dedicated hub for all things related to HelpNDoc, presented in thoughtful, in-depth articles. Here, we explore the breadth and depth of the software, shedding light on its features, offering tips and tricks, and providing insights on how to best leverage HelpNDoc to create compelling and comprehensive documentation. Our articles range from beginner’s guides and how-tos to expert advice and deep dives into advanced features. For those who prefer a more hands-on learning experience, we have a series of step-by-step guides available both as easy-to-follow text and engaging video content. Whether you’re a first-time user or an experienced documentation specialist, our goal is to empower you with knowledge and inspire you to make the most of HelpNDoc. Dive in to discover, learn, and enhance your understanding of this powerful tool.
We frequently post various resources to notify authors and technical writers about relevant news, articles, tips and tricks... to be as effective as possible at their daily jobs. Here is a selection of some recent resources we posted to various social networks. You should consider following us to get notified about future posts at: FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or Google+
Even though the HelpNDoc help authoring tool has been engineered to be extremely easy to use, some help might be required to get started using it or understand advanced functionalities. Fortunately, there are many resources available in various formats to easily and quickly grasp concepts and features available in HelpNDoc. Let's review them
We previously covered how to embed a YouTube video in your CHM or HTML help files. While YouTube is a great platform to share videos, some might prefer one of its main competitor, Vimeo. Fortunately, integrating a Vimeo video into your CHM or HTML help files is extremely easy with HelpNDoc
You can choose how your library items (pictures, movies, documents...) are handled by HelpNDoc: they can be included within your project, or they can be dynamically included at generation time, when you choose to build your final documentation files. Using the second option, you provide a path for your media items so that HelpNDoc can find and include them when needed. This is very useful to be able to handle those items from outside of HelpNDoc, share them with a third party software... However, a problem might occur if those items need to be moved on your hard drive or networked path: to make sure HelpNDoc can still find your media elements, you'll need to manually update all of them one by one. As this can be a very long, tedious and error-prone task, this is great use case for HelpNDoc's powerful script editor. Let's see how we can leverage it to quickly update the whole library in a few seconds
We were asked on FaceBook if it was possible to define a favicon to a HTML help build generated by HelpNDoc. This is a great question and the short answer is yes, absolutely, thanks to HelpNDoc’s powerful template system. Let’s see how this can be done by first creating our favicon, then our own custom template which will use that favicon
Once you've written your help file or documentation web-site, you'd usually like to be able to integrate it with your existing products: when users are having difficulties performing an action, they should be able to launch the help file and be presented with the correct associated topic explaining that specific action. For that purpose, Help Authoring Tools such as HelpNDoc provide two unique identifiers for each topic: an alpha-numeric Help ID and a numeric Help Context number. This makes it possible to reach a specific topic from your software application or web-site. But as a technical writer, you probably won't be in charge of "wiring" that application or web-site with the help file and you'd rather send a list of topic identifiers to the developers in charge. Thanks to HelpNDoc's very powerful script editor, you can easily do that!
HelpNDoc is so easy to use that a complete multi-format and multi-device documentation can be produced in just a few minutes after downloading and trying HelpNDoc for the first time thanks to its intuitive user interface and Microsoft Word-like topic editor. It is also extremely powerful and provides many advanced tools to simplify and speed-up the creation of amazing help files and manuals. One of those advanced feature is the script editor which lets you manipulate HelpNDoc through a scripting language. Let's see how the script editor can help you create the most useful help files in the shortest amount of time possible
Thanks to HelpNDoc's powerful conditional generation feature and its amazing build system, it is easier and faster than ever to produce multiple variations of a master documentation. Just imagine writing a complete help file, manual, book or documentation and then choosing which parts to include in each final product: you'll begin to understand how powerful this feature can be to provide different variations of your master documentation to multiple clients, customers, partners... Read on to learn how to effectively use HelpNDoc's conditional generation system.
YouTube videos are extremely useful to easily share an animated content such as a step-by-step guide or an how-to movie. It is worth considering adding a YouTube video in an HTML based documentation, such as a CHM help file, to showcase a procedure and make it more easily and rapidly understandable by the end-user. As an added advantage, the video file won't be embedded in the final documentation but streamed directly from YouTube, thus lowering the final documentation's size. Let's see how fast and easy it is to add a YouTube video to a CHM help file or an HTML documentation using HelpNDoc
Warning! Some information and techniques detailed on this page may be out of date. For more up-to-date information on this topic, we recommend that you check the following page: Import WinHelp HLP files, Google Analytics support in HTML documentation and more in HelpNDoc 5.9. Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google which can track various anonymous information about users visiting a web-site, such as which page have many views and for how long.