Discover a treasure trove of invaluable insights and shortcuts to maximize your proficiency with the HelpNDoc help authoring tool. Unearth hidden gems, streamline your workflow, and unlock the tool’s full potential as you delve into a collection of expert tips and tricks. From mastering advanced formatting techniques to harnessing time-saving features, this tag is your guide to becoming a HelpNDoc virtuoso. Elevate your documentation creation process, boost efficiency, and craft polished, professional help content with ease. Explore the Tips and Tricks section and embark on a journey to become a HelpNDoc maestro.
HelpNDoc is a leading user-friendly help authoring software that was designed to make technical writing easier. Over the years, the software has undergone several different development phases to make it more user-friendly, and with improved features, not only for technical writers but for authors as well. Presently, HelpNDoc is well known for its several different user-friendly features. Notably for its ability to generate several different file formats from just one source file including cross platform Qt Help files, Web-based HTML 5 documentations, standard Windows CHM help files, printable PDF and Word documents, ePub and Kindle eBooks as well as iPhone specific websites. But there’s more! Here are five other key features of HelpNDoc that will make writing your next technical documentation easier;
HelpNDoc's amazing responsive HTML web-site generation process can be customized to add a logo, tailored CSS and JavaScript code, translated strings and more... let's see how easy and fast it is to produce truly customized HTML documentation web-site using HelpNDoc
Writing an online help file, a user manual, an eBook or any other format handled by HelpNDoc is usually lengthy ongoing and non-linear process. Oftentimes, as the content evolves, the overall topic hierarchy can become sub-optimal and a re-organization is required in order to make the documentation easier to read and navigate. Even though HelpNDoc provides tools to easily re-organize the table of contents, in some cases the process can be lengthy and error-prone, such as when an alphabetical sorting of topics is required. Thankfully, HelpNDoc includes scripts to automatically re-order topics by title. Let's see how rapidly and easily this can be done
When producing a help file, a user manual or an eBook, it is not only important to provide translations based on the targeted audience, but also to use the proper terms based on the readers' languages. Let's take the "colour" term as an example: "color" is the preferred spelling in American English while "colour" is preferred in all other main varieties of English. As a technical writer, supporting multiple language variants can lead to complications and extra work to make sure that the whole documentation is error-free. Thankfully, the HelpNDoc help authoring tool makes this task trivial and fast thanks to variable placeholders and its powerful build system
HelpNDoc includes a very powerful script editor with access to multiple API methods which provides a way to automate almost all parts of your documentation creation and maintenance process. We've already seen how to use HelpNDoc's scripting capabilities to automate help and documentation creation, update the path of your external media elements when they are moved and export Help IDs and Help Context numbers for your developers. Let's now see how we can create a handy script to automatically reset help context numbers for all topics in the documentation project
HelpNDoc is a powerful help authoring tool which can generate multiple documentation formats (including CHM, HTML, Word, PDF, ePub, Kindle, Qt Help) from a single source. It includes a very powerful template system, which provides a way to customize almost any part of the generated documentation's look and feel. Once a custom template has been created, it can be shared between multiple co-workers or backed up easily. Let's see how this can be done
Even though the HelpNDoc help authoring tool has been engineered to be extremely easy to use, some help might be required to get started using it or understand advanced functionalities. Fortunately, there are many resources available in various formats to easily and quickly grasp concepts and features available in HelpNDoc. Let's review them
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
You can choose how your library items (pictures, movies, documents...) are handled by HelpNDoc: they can be included within your project, or they can be dynamically included at generation time, when you choose to build your final documentation files. Using the second option, you provide a path for your media items so that HelpNDoc can find and include them when needed. This is very useful to be able to handle those items from outside of HelpNDoc, share them with a third party software... However, a problem might occur if those items need to be moved on your hard drive or networked path: to make sure HelpNDoc can still find your media elements, you'll need to manually update all of them one by one. As this can be a very long, tedious and error-prone task, this is great use case for HelpNDoc's powerful script editor. Let's see how we can leverage it to quickly update the whole library in a few seconds
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
