Welcome to West Wind Html Help Builder. This product will make you productive at creating both end user and developer documentation. Heck, we bet that if you try it you will actually find yourself enjoying creating documentation. Promise!

If you are a developer and you want to document your classes and components and databases you will want to check out Help Builder's powerful features for quickly importing data and creating professional documentation from your code in a heartbeat. With all the crappy documentation out there, impress your customers or boss will the professional information and look that Help Builder will create for you. And it doesn't stop with our generated code - you can continue to edit content after its imported and you can even keep things in sync with your code through our development tool integration with Visual Studio .NET and Visual FoxPro.

The point is this: We create a ton of documentation for our own tools and applications and we've tried very hard to make it easy without giving up functionality. Help Creation should be easy and part of the development process without getting in the way!

Here's a summary of what Help Builder provides:

• Visual IDE
  Help Builder's environment is very similar to the HTML Help files you create with a content tree you add topics to and a topic editor you use to enter topic content into. Live previews let you see what your help file looks like at any time while building your help file and a preview is never more than a single click away. The interface is logical to use and intuitive to the point of making Help creation easy and (almost) fun.

• Focus on Content with HTML Template Driven Layout
  Documenting applications is often a dreaded task for developers because it involves creating the actual help content as well as laying out the topics visually. The idea is: Focus on content not on presentation while you type. You type plain text, the templates handle the markup! You only use markup for special highlights which typically are minimal. Help Builder uses standard HTML templates with embedded ASP like code expressions to represent content and you can even embed code logic in these templates to represent complex help displays using content pulled from the Help File, various helper functions or even external COM objects.

  Help Builder's template driven output lets you focus on creating content while still giving you full customization options. For presentation, HTML templates can be customized for default and custom topic types that you create. Each topic type can have its own display attributes. The beauty of this template approach is consistency and separation of the content from the presentation making it much quicker to generate help files.

• Cascading Style Sheets
  Style sheets let you customize the visual aspects like fonts and background colors for the entire help project in one place giving your project a consistent look. At the same time you can override the styles as needed on a by topic basis if necessary using plain HTML markup. And best of all it's based on Web standards using standard HTML with ASP-like markup for templates and even powerful template scripting.

• Customization
  Help Builder was built with developers in mind and you can customize just about every aspect of the help building process. Templates are programmable with script tags so you can create sophisticated functionality like topic driven tables and conditional field display with ease. The entire IDE and the help engine itself is accessible via a COM object. You can use your own HTML editors if you like or edit text inside of the IDE. The list goes on.

• Structured environment
  Structure is usually not a flattering word but in the Help building environment it helps to fill in the blanks instead of creating content from scratch each time. Help Builder's field based input allows you to build help topics in record time. And if you feel too confined, switch to WYSIWYG editing in live HTML view, or shell out to Word and keep on writing your text there. Structure with flexibility to give you the best of both worlds.

• Ease of use
  Help Builder is easy to use! The IDE is self-explanatory with the help file like structure and a powerful toolbar that provides access to most functions visually. Powerful Wizards help create topics quickly and are smart enough in aiding you by making common selections for you. Building a simple help file will take only minutes...

• Many output options
  Help Builder outputs to HTML Help File (CHM), a full HTML view including a frames based interface for browsing the help file online, and output to MS Word 2000 or later.
  
  
• Extensive Class and Database Imports
  If you're a developer creating components for your own and commercial use, Help Builder can help make your life a lot easier by easily allowing you to pull in your classes. Help Builder supports importing .NET types and assemblies, COM objects and type libraries, Web Services and Visual FoxPro classes. In addition you can also document SQL Server and Visual FoxPro Databases simply by pointing at the databases or tables.

• Developer Environment Integration
  Help Builder integrates with Visual Studio .NET and Visual FoxPro so Help Builder is only a click away. You can easily pull Help Ids into controls, pop up Help Builder Context sensitively on controls and code. In Visual Studio Help Builder can work with C# code and XML Comments to import content.

• COM Interface
  Help Builder is fully COM enabled so you can create projects, add and manage topics through a programmatic interface. You can even drive Help Builder's User Interface through the COM interface. Source code to the Visual Studio .NET Add-In is provided so you can get a sophisticated example of what you can do with Help Builder's COM model.
  
  
• Tools, Tools, Tools
  We built this tool because we need to build help files ourselves. In fact, one of our products has over 2000 topics of documentation. To facilitate creating and managing this process we've needed a number of tools to make creating help easy. We've included, topic sorters, bad link search utility, a screen capture utility, a custom icon manager, a flexible template manager, flexible linking tools with auto-complete, XML based exports and drag and drop, template schemes to allow you to have several different looks for the same content and the list goes on.
  

And there's so much more that we don't have room to describe. The best thing to do is download Help Builder today and see for yourself.

http://www.west-wind.com/files/wwhelp_rt.exe

Help has arrived!