![]() I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit that by mistake. There is a Close Project button on the toolbar right next to the Save Project button.In this case I do want to select from a drop-down list! I mostly only want to generate one type of document at once, but I want to be able to switch between them easily.I really want to be able to switch between these types of text instantly – I don’t want to have to select the font from a drop-down list. My help documents consist of a lot of text in a font like Arial, interspersed with code, in a font like Courier New. No support for text styles, or if there is I can’t find it.The other features that I find missing, or just plain irritating in the product are: If you do object, there are reasonably priced licenses for the software that remove it. ![]() This is unobtrusive, and I for one don’t really object. Now the bad news – the free version of HelpNDoc (free for personal use), adds a small advertising banner to the footer of each document. I tested the HTML, CHM and PDF generation, and they all produce nice looking documents, quickly and easily When it comes to output generation, HelpNDoc can produce plain HTML, Windows CHM help, Word documents and PDF. Adding new topics is a breeze, as is linking to them inside the word processor. You get a reasonably functional word processor, with spell-checking and nice support for tables, and an easy to navigate help-topic tree. It has a very clean, almost minimalistic user interface, but most of the features you need to write small-to-medium sized help files are there – I’ll come to the ones that are missing in a moment. Perhaps unfairly, HelpNDoc comes across as a cut-down version of Help & Manual. And then I came across HelpNDoc, by IBE Software (with whom I have absolutely no relationship). For a bit, I toyed with the idea of writing something myself, but GUI programming is not really what I’m into. I suspect that fact that most programmers don’t like writing documentation (I rather enjoy it) means they don’t want to write tools to help them do it. So, I started casting about for a FOSS alternative, and for a while came up empty handed. I wanted something that any contributors to my FOSS projects could use to update the help.I couldn’t afford to buy the latest version of H&M.My ancient (legal) copy of H&M 3.4 seemed unhappy on Windows 7.I had previously been a happy user, and paid-up licensee, of the well-known Help and Manual, but I wanted to move away from that for several reasons: I recently started to write the help for a new project of mine (see here for details), so I was in the market for a new help-writing tool for Windows. ![]()
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