1.1. What Is Helptrix Author
Helptrix (www.helptrix.com) is a help authoring system for creating professional help and manuals in several formats from a single source. Helptrix strongly supports multi-language manuals and therefore provides possibilities for translating help or manuals to additional languages and maintaining multi-language help systems.
Helptrix consists of two separate applications:
- Helptrix Author is the application where you create chapters and topics of your manual, create content of topics, write texts or insert images.
- Helptrix Translator is the place where you translate your help or manual to additional languages and maintain multi-language help systems.
With Helptrix you can publish manuals in several formats:
- HTML Help is a standard online Windows help format since Windows 98. Provides three pane user interface with help ToC on the left, indexes, quick search and context sensitive help for your users. It is an ideal choice to distribute along with your Windows applications.
- PDF is a open de facto standard for electronic document distribution with great printing abilities. You can distribute PDF manual electronical way and your users can print it themselfs, or you can print it immediately and ship it.
- HTML is used fo browser based help. Placing your manual on Internet or intranet is perfect solution for multiplatform environment. It comes as a simple HTML page or sophisticated version with frames and JavaScript functionality, which it makes look like HTML Help in three pane style, and it also provides context sensitive help.
- DocBook XML. XML is markup language designed to describe and carry data. DocBook is a very popular XML vocabulary for writing technical documentation, any kind of manuals or books. With your help in DocBook standard you have more opportunities to work with it further.
Lot of features make Helptrix extremely usefull:
- Single Source. All outputs are created from the same single source. Write only once and publish many times. Single sourcing keeps content of your help system or manual perfectly consistent and keeps all your outputs up to date.
- Multilanguage. Full multilanguage support allows you to translate your manuals and maintain them in several languages and preserves, that all languages have the same content.
- Focus On Content.You can focus only on content you are writing instead of annoying formatting. Set formatting rules when you create outputs.
- Creating Outputs. Graphic user interface for creating outputs. Just select language and type of output.
- United Look. Layout of your outputs is done automatically, which means that your manual is looking same way in each output and for each language version.
- Automation. When producing output, chapters and topics are numbered, table of content with page numbers is created, figures and tables are numbered, description for links are created. All of this and more is in proper language and is done automatically for you.
- Intuitive User Interface. Editor window is designed in three pane style. User interface looks like HTML Help output. Use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interface for very easy topic editing.
- Conditional Output. Conditional output allows you to assign parts of your manual only to online or printed output. This is perfectly suitable for images, when you can assign color image in low quality to appear only in online output and grayscale high quality image to appear in printed version.
- Context Sensitive Help. Allows you to connect parts of your application with certain topics. Really easy, fully graphical assigning context help IDs from your application to topics in your help system. Context sensitive help is present in HTML Help output and with Helptrix also in browser based output in HTML format!
- Topic Status. Topics include date and time stamp, and can be marked with status of completion. All this helps you to keep track of topics, where some work left.
- Links And Images. Easy visual inserting of links to another topics and inserting of images. Using proper version of images for each language is preserved.
- Index Words. Each topic can include index keywords, that in final output provide user of your help with quick acces to desired information.
- Collaborative Work. Export your projects into ZIP archive and send it to all your translators via e-mail. When translated projects are back, import languages directly from ZIP file.
- Quick Backup. One-click backup of your project directly to ZIP file.
- Open Solution. Helptrix is based on XML technology. All help content is stored in plain XML files, so it can be reused by another applications or created by another application from scratch as well. DocBook standard is supported, which means possibility of adding more output formats due to your needs.
