Forearmed with ForeHelp News & Views Software Review

by Donn DeBoard Senior Technical Writer Vertex, Inc. (Berwyn, Pennsylvania) ForeFront, Inc. 5171 Eldorado Springs Drive, Boulder, CO 80303 (303) 499-9181. Originally published in News & Views March, 1996 issue. Copyright 1996 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

Somebody at ForeFront, Inc. must have dissected every Windows Help authoring product in the market to find what was useful and what was lacking in order to build their own tool, ForeHelp. They took the time and effort to design a better product by being mindful of the WinHelp developer's need to produce effective help quickly and easily. ForeHelp allows you to focus on help design by providing a WYSIWYG environment that doesn't require the building of help source material in Microsoft Word for Windows and compiling it in a DOS window. ForeHelp components ForeHelp consists of several components: The Grapher shows the structure of the topics in your help using a hierarchical model similar to the directory/file structure in the Windows File Manager. The Navigator graphically shows the relationship of the jumps and popups between topics to help you visualize your help file structure. The Reporter allows you to print specialized reports about the contents and the structure of your help project. A test feature lets you to see your help file as an end user will see it. A database approach ForeHelp treats each help project as a database, doing the work of managing all project components. You won't have to worry about a stray file squirreled away in an isolated directory. And, as an authoring tool should, ForeHelp features good online help that includes a tutorial, a ForeHelp sample, a glossary sample, and help on using WinHelp macros. In case you're worried about authoring without the word processing punch of Word for Windows, ForeHelp contains a word processor with which you can format text with paragraph styles, paragraph formatting, and character formatting. You can also spell-check your help, use a thesaurus, perform advanced search-and-replaces, and create tables. ForeHelp makes it easy to exploit the WinHelp interface. You can create context-sensitive help links, create hypertext hotspots on text or graphics, and customize the size, position, and color of your help windows. ForeHelp also provides easy drag-and-drop tools to link topics together, and create and modify browse sequences. You can incorporate WinHelp macros to call other Windows programs or even display video clips within a help file topic. ForeHelp allows you to work with files created in other applications. You can import help files created with other WinHelp authoring tools, RTF (Rich Text Format) and text-only files, Windows bitmaps and metafiles, and pictures stored in WinHelp's unique multiple-resolution and hypergraphic format. Prototype early and often You can create a thumbnail version or prototype of your help very quickly and easily. The process of creating a contents topic, body topics, topic links, popups, and browse sequences is short. You can get an idea of how your help looks, then revise and polish it until you're satisfied with the final prototype. Your customers, of course, make the final decision about the effectiveness of your help. The best thing about ForeHelp is that it lets you focus on the information your customers need instead of the tools you use to present it, regardless of the complexity of your help project.

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Last updated: November 6, 1996 (wq)