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Displaying Help in an integrated (embedded) pane in a Windows app

New Here ,
Apr 10, 2008 Apr 10, 2008

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I am evaluating various help authoring tools to produce content for a help system that we will display in a pane within the window of a desktop Windows application. I was unable to find anything in the RoboHelp 7 product Help or this forum regarding this. Does RoboHelp provide an SDK or other tools for reducing the development effort required to display Help topics within an embedded pane? This display pane must have Help navigation controls just as if it were displaying in a child or independent window, both for topics accessed from the TOC, Index, Search, inline links, or via context-sensitivity in a dialog or app window.

If RoboHelp does not provide such as SDK, do any of you know of a source for licensable code that would help us achieve this result?

Thanks,

Mary Deaton

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Advisor ,
Apr 10, 2008 Apr 10, 2008

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Embedded help is strictly on the shoulders of your developers, no matter what HAT you use to design your help.

Google "embedded help" (include the quotes); there seems to be enough reading there to keep you busy for awhile.


Good luck,
Leon

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Enthusiast ,
Apr 10, 2008 Apr 10, 2008

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Hi, Mary,

If it weren't for the fact that you want to show the navigation controls in the help pane then I would have recommended KeyHelp ( http://www.keyworks.net/keyhelp.htm), which makes it straightforward for developers to fetch the contents of an HTML Help topic and display them in an embedded window.

What you want to do looks achievable because Rob Chandler's publication "Delphi Programming for the HTML Help API" provides some guidelines on how to do so. The procedure seems to involve using the HTML Help API command HH_SET_WIN_TYPE to create the help window, the attributes of which are defined using an HH_WINTYPE structure, and then embedding this in the application window. See this page for documentation and code samples:

http://helpware.net/delphi/index.html

Rob is active in the following forums, so you may want to pick his brains further on the subject.

microsoft.public.helpauthoring newsgroup (news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.helpauthoring)
Help 2.0 discussion group on Yahoo
Developer Documentation and Help System forum on MSDN

The MSDN forum could be a good place to request further ideas, as it is largely populated by developers rather than authors.

Pete

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Guest
Apr 11, 2008 Apr 11, 2008

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If you are using C#, or any .NET Language, you could use the following:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/htmlhelp.aspx

At one point, I did use this with my output.
It worked pretty well.

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Explorer ,
Apr 16, 2008 Apr 16, 2008

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If you're not tied to RoboHelp, then Madcap Flare offers an outupt type called DotNet Help with an SDK to tie in directly with desktop apps written in VB.net. It does require installing the Madcap help viewer on the end user's machine which may be a drawback. This is similar in concept to Adobe AIR, that is, the use of a separate proprietary help viewer.

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