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Help Builder Screen Shots

This page shows some highlights of Help Builder's features in a gallery
of screen shots. These screen shots are fairly large to give a you full
view of the Help Builder IDE environment, so you might want adjust your
browser width accordingly. Most of the screen shots come directly from
the Help Builder Documentation so if you're intrigued by any of these you
can either download the fully functional Help Builder demo or review the
documentation for more detail.

The Help Builder IDE

This first screen shot shows the Help Builder IDE in preview mode. In preview mode you see the topic rendered just as you will see it in the final help file.
 

 

Rich Edit Mode

The following image shows Help Builder in topic edit mode. In this topic the user has chosen to use the rich HTML Editing mode (indicated by the depressed Explorer) button above the body field. As you can see in rich edit mode you can type in WYSIWYG mode and see the topic content rendered into HTML as you type. The Edit Toolbar is available to insert common markup. Actually using Help Builder you have the option of using rich HTML editing as shown below or using plain text editing to enter text. While Html editing is nice to see what the topic will look like immediately, the HTML editor is not as quick as the plain text editor and cannot handle all text editing scenarios as efficiently as the text editor.

 

Editing content with Word

If you are editing Help Content as plain text you can also utilize Microsoft Word for editing directly within Help Builder to take advantage of Words on the fly spell and grammar checking and auto-correct features. This feature requires that Microsoft Word is installed

Spell checking is also available separately (although it does still require MS Word) via the Toolbar. This separate option works both in text and HTML Edit modes.

 

Integrated Screen Captures

Capturing content from screens is fairly common in Help applications and Help Builder provides two mechanisms for capturing screen images. Shown below is Help Builder using the popular SnagIt utillity to capture images. The SnagIt Screen Capture utility from Techsmith is by far the easiest and most powerful tool for screen captures and Help Builder integrates with it for screen captures if it is installed. If you don't own SnagIt a less sophisticated capture mechanism using Alt-PrtScn with a custom capture form can be used to capture screen images. Once images are captured they are immediately embedded into the current topic at the current cursor position.

Creating Crosslinks

Creating crosslinks in Help Builder is super easy: You simply highlight the text you want to link from and select the bookmark option from the toolbar. A dialog pops up that lets you uses Autocompletion to help find your target topic or lets you select either from the drop down list.

If you really need to dig a little to find your topic you can use the integrated Topic browser and the Search dialog that pops up everywhere you can select a topic. In short, we've tried to make it easy to find your topics.

   

Source Code Syntax Color Highlighting

If you are building developer documentation it's often important to display code of various sorts. Help Builder allows you to embed code and display in sytnax color highlighted format. Help Builder supports various languages including C#, VB.NET, Visual FoxPro, Java as well as XML and HTML for highlighting. To highlight text you can either paste your text as Formatted text or highlight the text after it's in the document and mark it for formatting.

.NET Windows Forms Integration

To help you hook up your Help Content to your .NET applications Help Builder provides a Visual Studio Add-In that greatly simplifies hooking up your help topic to Windows Forms controls. Help Builder activates whenever a Windows Forms HelpProvider component is on a form. The following image demonstrates how to pop up Help Builder in context of the currently:

Once you are in Help Builder you can then go and select a specific topic that you would like to assign to a particular control or the form. You can then update the control with the Help Content information automatically. In addition Help Builder also ships with a custom HelpProvider component that allows you to optionally pop up Help Builder at runtime - it inherits all of HelpProviders functionality so it's a an optional drop in replacement for the stock Windows Forms Help Provider.

Importing .NET Classes or Assemblies

If you are interested in building developer documentation Help Builder can import individual .NET types or an entire assembly and create detailed documentation from it.

The result of such an import looks like this (as shown in the first image):

Source Code -> Help Builder and Help Builder -> Source Code Updates

Once you've imported a class or type you can further edit the content and even keep it in synch with Help Builders two way tools via the Visual Studio .NET add-in. You can basically use XML comments to import or update content in Help Builder or you can push an updated topic back into source code using the Insert XML Comment option in the VS.NET add-in.

This first screen shot demonstrates what happens when you bring up Help Builder from a member - it pops up Help Builder with the matching member or class selected.

You can then proceed to make changes to the topic text in source code and sync it back up to Help Builder:

Along the same lines you can use the Insert XML comment option to insert a comment from Help Builder back into the source code. This feature works both with C# and Visual Basic although Visual Basic 2003 does not support XML comments without some custom add-ins.

Another option of course is ability to simply re-import the assembly or class as needed. Help Builder provides a number of options that let you choose how topics are imported - whether they overwrite content or keep any content intact and only add new content. A feature to auto-import assemblies or classes automatically via  switch at build time (much like NDoc does) will be added in a future point release.

Output Generation

Help Builder provides output in a variety of ways: Html Help 1.0, Html Help 2.0 and plain HTML. You can also export to Word as a separate Export operation.

When it's all done you can do a number of things with the output:

Help Builder output can be generated to Html Help 1.0:

to MSDN style HTML Help 2.0:

Html Help 2.0 can also be imported into VS.NET once generated:

You can also export your Help File to a Word document. By using a custom template scheme you can take your existing help content and simply generate a Word document - the content is generated into a Word template and the output looks like this:

And when you generate your output for a Help file output is also generated as plain HTML that you can easily display on your Web site:

The HTML is locally generated and to help you upload the content to your Web Site Help Builder includes an FTP client that uploads the project content to the Web site:

 

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