HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a cornerstone in the creation of digital help content through Help Authoring Tools (HATs) such as HelpNDoc. As the universal language for constructing webpages, it provides the structural foundation that organizes and presents information in a user-friendly way. HelpNDoc is a powerful Help Authoring Tool (HAT) that can efficiently produce fully responsive HTML websites, ensuring that your help content is accessible, navigable, and visually appealing across all device types and screen sizes.
One of the most important help file format produced by the HelpNDoc help authoring tool is the HTML documentation format: the fully functional documentation web-sites can be hosted on any web server for quick access to self-service documentation, thus simplifying customer accessibility and the work of the support team. Support agents frequently need to share context-sensitive URLs to customers to explain specific tasks but those are often too long and hard to remember and type. Fortunately, every topics created in HelpNDoc can have an unlimited number of URL aliases: let's see how they can be defined in HelpNDoc's user interface.
We were asked on FaceBook if it was possible to define a favicon to a HTML help build generated by HelpNDoc. This is a great question and the short answer is yes, absolutely, thanks to HelpNDoc’s powerful template system. Let’s see how this can be done by first creating our favicon, then our own custom template which will use that favicon
Step 1: Define HTML setting Click the top half of Generate help in the Home ribbon tab. This displays the ‘Generate Documentation’ window.
Select the HTML build to modify in the build list on the left-hand side.
If the Template settings tab is not displayed, click Customize to view it. Click the ‘Expand table of contents tree’ box to remove the check mark.
This will generate your documentation in HTML format with a collapsed table of contents.
Microsoft Word, and similar word processing software such as LibreOffice, are great to write and format documents meant to be printed, but not so good at producing HTML websites from those documents: they generate suboptimal single-page HTML / CSS code which is not optimized for different screen sizes and devices such as smartphones. By leveraging the import and export capabilities of a help authoring tool such as HelpNDoc (which is free for personal use), it is extremely easy to convert a Word document to a fully functional multi-page and responsive HTML 5 website. Let’s dive in...
We previously covered how to embed a YouTube video in your CHM or HTML help files. While YouTube is a great platform to share videos, some might prefer one of its main competitor, Vimeo. Fortunately, integrating a Vimeo video into your CHM or HTML help files is extremely easy with HelpNDoc
Creating the most complete, comprehensive and up-to-date documentation is the number one priority of technical writers. But readers expect a clean and modern design and companies oftentimes need to integrate documentation web-sites with their existing material, thus mimicking a predefined look-and-feel. Thankfully, the HelpNDoc help authoring tool lets you rapidly add a logo or custom CSS code for quick customization, or even create a completely new template to fully customize your deliverables. In this article, let’s see how you can use customized icons in the generated HTML documentation’s table of contents.
