Kbase 15460: Developing Help in Progress Version 8 - General
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
15/10/2008 |
|
Status: Verified
GOAL:
How Progress develops Help and some comments that would aid in developing a Help system in Version 8.
FACT(s) (Environment):
Progress 8.x
FIX:
The PROGRESS Help Development Guide explains how to develop a Help system with the aid of a word processor. This pretty much amounts to doing it from scratch and is probably still the simplest way of doing things for Help systems consisting of 50 or less topics. For most major help systems however, it is
probably smarter to develop a Help authoring tool.
Progress uses RoboHelp from Blue Sky Software, which in our experience to date, is the most widely-used tool for Windows. Progress uses HyperHelp from Bristol Bay to convert and re-compile the Windows Help files for Motif platforms and (pre-V8) UNIX character platforms. The basic strategy is to author on Windows
and convert and recompile to other platforms. The technology to convert and redeploy to Motif platforms is out-of-the-box Bristol Bay HyperHelp. The technology to deploy character Help is Progress-modified Bristol Bay technology.
Previous to version 8, to support character Help, we were locked into specific versions of MS-Windows and Motif tools. If you want to deploy Help that includes Progress character Help, you must abide by these restrictions:
Use MS-Word 5.0 or higher
Use the character viewer supplied with Version 8 PROGRESS
Use the compilers supplied with PROGRESS.
If your Help deployment does not include character platforms, you can use the latest versions of Windows and Motif tools. For Help to be deployed on both Motif and MS-Windows, we still recommend developing it on Windows, since we currently have no experience doing it the other way around.
If you choose to use a Help authoring tool, the manuals supplied will also cover various strategies for developing Help. Do you want to create Help from existing documents? Do you want to develop a style that lets you develop information topics that can then be assembled into either a book or Help file? It is even
possible with consistently formatted reference information, like the PROGRESS Language Reference, to develop macros using the Word Basic language to convert the reference pages into Help topics.
Whatever strategy you choose will require learning the appropriate tools and customizing the solution to your needs.