Discover a treasure trove of invaluable insights and shortcuts to maximize your proficiency with the HelpNDoc help authoring tool. Unearth hidden gems, streamline your workflow, and unlock the tool’s full potential as you delve into a collection of expert tips and tricks. From mastering advanced formatting techniques to harnessing time-saving features, this tag is your guide to becoming a HelpNDoc virtuoso. Elevate your documentation creation process, boost efficiency, and craft polished, professional help content with ease. Explore the Tips and Tricks section and embark on a journey to become a HelpNDoc maestro.
PHP is a powerful server-side scripting language that has been an essential tool for web development for decades. With its ability to dynamically generate content, enhance user experience, handle security restrictions, increase interactivity or collect user data, it is a great addition to online user documentation. Thanks to the HelpNDoc help authoring tool's powerful and versatile template system, these benefits are now easily achievable: let's explore how incorporating PHP into online user documentation can help to improve the user experience and provide better engagement and feedback. Whether you're a web developer, a technical writer, or someone looking to enhance their online documentation, this post will provide valuable insights and tips on how to use HelpNDoc to make the most of PHP in your online documentation.
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
Microsoft Word, and similar word processing software such as LibreOffice, are great to write and format documents meant to be printed, but not so good at producing HTML websites from those documents: they generate suboptimal single-page HTML / CSS code which is not optimized for different screen sizes and devices such as smartphones. By leveraging the import and export capabilities of a help authoring tool such as HelpNDoc (which is free for personal use), it is extremely easy to convert a Word document to a fully functional multi-page and responsive HTML 5 website. Let’s dive in...
CHM help files are used to provide online help and documentation for software applications, plugins or drivers, and are commonly distributed with Windows installers. Third-party programs like HelpNDoc are specialized help authoring software tools that can make it easier and faster to create a CHM help file. Using a third-party program to create a CHM help file can provide several benefits compared to using the built-in HTML Help Workshop program provided by Microsoft, as they offer a user-friendly graphical interface, powerful features, time-saving tools, and flexibility that can make it easier and more efficient to create a professional-looking CHM help file. In this article, we will discuss these benefits in more detail and provide an overview of the steps for creating a CHM help file using a help authoring tool. Whether you are new to creating help files or an experienced technical writer, these programs can provide valuable tools and resources to help you create high-quality help content for your users.
Creating CHM (Compiled HTML Help) files with HelpNDoc is a breeze, thanks to its user-friendly interface and powerful features. In this article we'll look into the specifics of how you can set the initial position and size of your CHM files to make sure they open exactly the way you want them to. We'll also touch on some of the limitations of this help file format and provide a useful tip for resetting your CHM file settings. Let's get started!
Technical writers can use a special robots.txt file or define robots meta tags in their HTML documentation to specify how popular search engines, such as Google or Bing, should index and serve individual pages in search results. In this article, we will see how we can update the default HTML template provided by the HelpNDoc help authoring tool to generate a robots.txt file, specify a project-wide default value for the robots meta tag, and override its content on specific documentation pages.
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
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!
Technical writers rely on hyperlinks to organize and reference multiple parts of their printed user manuals, eBooks or help files. Making sure hyperlinks are up to date is very important as broken hyperlinks can disrupt the learning flow of the end-user, who might be overwhelmed as she couldn't find the information needed: this can lead to increased support costs if a support ticket is opened. Thankfully, the HelpNDoc help authoring tool includes a straightforward hyperlink analyzer to help technical writers quickly spot and fix problematic hyperlinks.
HelpNDoc's stunning user interface has been carefully designed to be as clean and easy to use as possible. It presents the minimum needed to be as fast and effective as possible in writing and producing help files, user manuals and eBooks; Yet it provides advanced features for power users such as the ability to move, resize and place panels wherever you'd like. Let's see how this can be achieved in this article.
