Hello,
(RH7, we currently use .chm files but are open to other formats)
I have an idea and am trying to figure out how possible it is, but I'm not even sure I can properly explain it.
Instead of having to grab screenshots and manually add/delete/update them in our Help, I was thinking it'd be nice if there was some way that our Help and actual application could be linked so that, for example, if I opened the Help for the application login screen, it could go out and "grab" the current UI and display it in the login help section.
My original thought is that this would occur whenever the help is opened, to ensure the screen images are absolutely current to that machine (i.e. no worrying about customized screens, older installs, different versions, etc.). But it also seems fine if you could do this at compile time - at the very least, it'd reduce the need to maintain screenshots.
Beyond that, ideally, it'd be amazing if one could set up the help so that it could "see" what fields are included in the screen and show the appropriate help. Our app screens are customizable, so different customers will use different fields or move them around to different screens or tabs within the same screen. I could see implementing a DITA approach to make the content modular, but again, no idea if it's possible for the Help to be smart enough to see what fields are currently in a given UI and then select the appropriate content modules to display in that help section.
(obviously this idea is mostly for our screen-based help section, but it also seems helpful for our procedural-based help sections).
I don't know if this even makes sense, or if I've explained it well enough.
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