I got an email yesterday with an invitation to view an online demo of MadCap Flare. When I first heard about MadCap back in March I thought it sounded very promising. With the slow death of FrameMaker and an extremely uncertain future for RoboHelp, the time is surely right for someone to arrive on the scene and produce a killer app for technical assistance. MadCap Flare sounded promising. However, things have been very quiet, so I was pleased to hear about the demo and I went straight to have a look at it, eager to see how far along they'd got. Unfortunately, the demo is not encouraging. It sticks to the user interface, which is ... well, a user interface. You seen one GUI these days, you pretty much seem 'em all. What I wanted to know is what MadCap Flare can do. Is it the application I need to write MAML-based help for Windows Vista? Will it be the single source solution I've been searching for to allow me to produce application User Assistance and printed documentation from the same text? Who knows? All MadCap are saying is: it'll be great, it'll be just what you need, you can switch from RoboHelp, it's got a nice looking GUI (that does all the stuff GUIs do - see the demo) ... Maybe they'll deliver the goods. Maybe Microsoft have something up their sleeves. Who knows? Not me! MadCap's demo page is at: www.madcapsoftware.com/products/demos.asp Maybe by the time you read this they'll have added a more interesting demo.

Microsoft have changed the design of their "Discussion Group" interface at microsoft.com. One result of this is that the link I was using to get to the helpauthoring newsgroup (which I included in my posting of 19 May) no longer works. The alternative is: www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.helpauthoring If you're using Internet Explorer, this is a good alternative to the previous version. If you're using Firefox it looks horrible and isn't easy to use. How like Microsoft to develop an IE-only solution. Read the rest of this entry »

I've been using the microsoft.public.helpauthoring newsgroup again over the past couple of weeks. It's an incredibly useful resource, particularly the fact that it allows you to contact experts like Rob Chandler and Pete Lees, who invariably provide the answer you're looking for – usually within a day or so.

The trouble with this newsgroup is that you have to know about it. It's not that easy to find. So here are some ways to get to it.

Using your browser

This is the way I usually read this newsgroup. Browse to:

http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=web_publishing_all&slcid=us&newsgroup=microsoft.public.helpauthoring

This provides a nice interface to the newsgroup. The drawbacks with this method are that you have to type in your name/email every time you post a comment and you don't see any attachments that people might post.

[Update: The above link no longer works. Microsoft changed the interface to this newsgroup shortly after I posted this. See posting of 19 May.]

Using a newsreader

My newsreader of choice is Thunderbird. To read microsoft.public.helpauthoring in Thunderbird, set up a new account for the public news server msnews.microsoft.com. Once the account is added, click Manage newsgroup subscriptions. Search for helpauthoring and subscribe to microsoft.public.helpauthoring.

The drawback with this approach is that you don't get any message threading, you just get a separate entry for each posting – so it's difficult to read through a set of connected postings. Thunderbird normally handles threading very nicely. I can only assume it's something to do with the way msnews.microsoft.com serves up it's newsgroup output.

However, not all newsreaders suffer from this problem ...

Using Outlook Express

I don't like to suggest you use Outlook Express, but it does handle message threading for microsoft.public.helpauthoring.

Set it up in more or less the same way described above. Or – if Outlook Express is your default newsreader – clicking the following link will set it up for you:

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.helpauthoring

It's quite handy to drag this link to your Bookmarks/Favorites as a quick way to get to the newsgroup.

Using RSS

You can use the following link to Google Groups to add an RSS feed to your newsreader (e.g. Thunderbird) or to the Sage add-on for Firefox:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/microsoft.public.helpauthoring/feed/msgs.xml

However, this also does not provide you with any threading.

Google Groups provides an alternative way to read postings in a browser. Browse to:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/microsoft.public.helpauthoring

However, I don't like the way this is set out and I don't find it easy to use. Also, some replies seem to be missing. On the plus side, using Google Groups to search the newsgroup does provide a very quick way of finding information in old postings.

Following on from my previous posting, I've found a smarter way to test context-sensitive help topics, using a Windows batch file. This way involves only one batch file, rather than two (as described previously).

Put the following batch file in your help directory. In my case this directory contains various subdirectories, one for each help project. The one I'm currently working on is called imuser, so this is the default project directory in the batch file, and the help file within this subdirectory is imuser.chm, so again this is the default. Change the two lines near the top of the batch file to change these defaults.

Once in place, all you do is double click the batch file in Windows Explorer, or double-click a shortcut to this batch file on your desktop, or in your Favorites, and a console window opens prompting you for the path, file name and map ID you want to use. You can hit Enter twice if you want to accept the defaults, but you must enter a map ID.

The help file is opened using keyHH.exe, which is a free download from Keyworks Software.

The batch file:

Read the rest of this entry »

If, when you click a link in an HTML Help topic, you get an HTML Help Author Message dialog box, with the message You need to specify two Item parameters for the Shortcut command. it is probably because you are using a networked help file. I have a topic containing the following link, which is meant to open a PDF in a separate browser window: <object     classid="clsid:ADB880A6-D8FF-11CF-9377-00AA003B7A11"     id="OBJECT1" type="application/x-oleobject">     <param name="Command" value="Shortcut">     <param name="Text" value="Text:User’s Guide">     <param name="Font" value="Verdana,8,0,,UNDERLINE">     <param name="Item1" value=",userguide.pdf,"> </object> This works fine if everything is on the local machine, but if I try to use it on a network server, it fails with the above message. The reason for this is a security fix in version 1.4 of the HTML Help viewer that prevents the viewer being used to open up files on a remote computer. This was a big security hole in previous versions of the viewer. For more details, see: http://helpware.net/htmlhelp/hh_info.htm#hh14