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Creating help files
Professional AND amateur developers often don’t know how to properly document their projects, especially through user manuals, operations manuals and how-to guides. Creating lengthy MS Word files with embedded images is hardly appropriate.
For this purpose, a properly compiled Windows help file, called a CHM, can be useful. This is a collection of webpages put together to make your job easy. Let’s see how one can create a CHM with a free utility — Easy CHM.
Planning the help system
Before going further, it is necessary to note that all material to be used in a help file should be placed in one folder. This folder should contain a hierarchy of web pages and sub-folders, which can be mapped as a compiled help. For example, if you want your file to have an intro page titled “Welcome”, create “Welcome.htm” with the title set to “Welcome”. Then, say, you want three books — “What’s New”, “Getting Started” and “Main Screen” — to appear below the Welcome page. Create folders with the respective names and place relevant pages inside them.
Getting started
The utility for creating help files can be downloaded from http://www.zipghost.com/. Open Easy CHM. The main screen displays panels just like a compiled help. Go to File>New Project. Press Browse. Select the folder in which all the help material has been organized.
Press “Import Options” to get yourself familiarized with the available options. As TOC (the left-hand side navigation frame with books and pages) is generated automatically, the tools give you an option of choosing between the title tag, full file name or file name without the extension to be used as a TOC caption. The first option is the default one. After the TOC title tab, there’s a TOC icon tab, giving you control over icon selection. You can change the default brown-book help icon using “default”, “default 2”, “folder” or “user defined options”. In “Others”, you can select the order in which the folder and files are going to be displayed. Press OK. All files in your help structure folder are listed, along with the sub-folders appearing as books and the webpages inside sub-folders appearing as help pages. For nested sub-folders, the standard “+” sign for expand/collapse functionality appears automatically
Ordering the TOC
Once all the material is listed in the left-hand side frame, use the left, right, up and down arrows to change the placement of books and pages of the help file. You can change one book into a sub-book of another by simply sliding it to the right side of its upper level book, using the right arrow. However, this is not a good practice as your CHM structure would no longer depict the actual folder structure.
Association
Books are merely names, without a page associated with them. Right-click a book and select “Topic Property”. Here, you can change the book’s icon, caption and the associate file. After a page has been associated with a book, you won’t want it to appear separately in the list of pages, so don’t forget to delete it.
Speed
Name the folders and files in such a way so that they appear in a correct position when converted to CHM. For example, append sequence numbers 01, 02, 03 in folder and file names, for example, “01.Welcome.htm and 09.About_Us.htm” to ensure that the Welcome page appears at first position and the About Us page appears at last position (in a nine-page help file). If you fail to do this, the default alphabetic ordering would cause “About Us” to display at the top and “Welcome” at the bottom. You can fix this by manually ordering the pages using the up and down arrow.
Compilation
Now for compilation. Go to File>Compile Project. Here, the important things to look out for are the CHM title, default page and home page. It is advisable to set the first page of the help file as both the default and homepage. Press “CHM Settings” to gain more control. Here, you have seven categories in which several changes can be made. Press “Create CHM”. Pressing “View CHM” opens up the newly created compiled help.
The main advantage of this tool is its ease of use. Unlike the “Help Workshop”, there is no tagging to be done, no IDs to be set, no separate management of TOC file or index file search files, and so on. Everything is provided in a single interface. There is also a powerful import feature to convert HTML pages into a nicely compiled help. Keep exploring. Good documentation can really make a difference.
The writer’s email is nizar.ali@gmail.com
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