ITauthor

I just stumbled across the ESRI's WebHelp for ArcGIS. Very, very nice!

http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.2/index.cf...

I particularly like how they've done the Print/Email/Feedback links in the title box for each topic, and the way they've done Related Topics.

Some really good ideas and a nice design. I wish I'd seen this a few months back before I got so far down the road with the WebHelp I'm currently working on.

A while back I had a problem with glossary pop-ups I'd designed for the online help system I'd been working on. The content in these pop-ups was dynamically extracted from a central XML file and everything worked fine in HTML Help and in WebHelp when opened directly, but not when the WebHelp pages were served up over HTTP. I solved that problem (see Making XMLDOM ActiveX control work over HTTP) but then I found that RoboHelp pop-ups had the same symptom, apparently caused by something else (since the RoboHelp JavaScript doesn't use the XMLDOM ActiveX control). Anyway, while searching Google for an answer I came across this article about RoboHelp in a blog by someone called Ryan: www.youknowwhatpart.com/archives/2005/03/productivity_to.html It's an interesting blog and I spent a bit of time there, but it left me wondering: who is this guy? How come he knows about RoboHelp and Madcap and Framemaker? Is he a technical writer? The blog gives nothing away. The "View my profile" link goes to a blank entry on Technorati. But then I thought, my blog probably says nothing about who I am either!

MadCap have added a new Flare demo at: www.madcapsoftware.com/products/demos.asp# I didn't think much of the first one (see Disappointing MadCap Flare demo) but this demo is more interesting. It shows a RoboHelp X5 project being imported into Flare. I find it quite amusing how much emphasis MadCap place on the fact that some of their guys used to work on RoboHelp at eHelp. OK, you've told us already! We get it! Your whole business plan is predicated on RoboHelp users switching to Flare. Fine. Let's see if MadCap can deliver on their promises.

There's an interesting article about the possible (probable?) demise of RoboHelp at: www.winwriters.com/articles/rh/

The Help system I was recently working on uses Microsoft's XMLDOM ActiveX control for glossary pop-ups. When the user clicks a highlighted word the ActiveX control parses the contents of an XML file and displays the appropriate definition in a pop-up. This works fine when you access the Web-based Help directly off the file system (e.g. \\servername\path\to\WebHelp\index.htm), but it didn't work when the same files was accessed over HTTP (e.g. http://www.domain.xyz/path/to/WebHelp/index.htm) and I couldn't work out why. The solution is something to do with asynchronous loading (the page loads before the ActiveX control - or something like that). Anyhow, whatever the precise reason, the solution is to turn off asynchronous loading. You do this by adding one line to your JavaScript. So, for me, immediately after the line: mx_xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM"); I added: mx_xmlDoc.async=false; and this solved the problem.