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Consider using Windows Help for electronic publishing, since every copy of Windows comes with a copy of the WinHelp "reader." Electronic documents are less expensive to distribute, get into user hands faster, and are easier to search, copy and print than paper documentation. It's easy to write simple help files, but the tools for doing so are not included in the standard Windows package. You must either find shareware or buy a commercial package such as ForeHelp ($395; 800-357-8507, 303-499-9181) or HelpBreeze 1.6 ($279; 408-736-1431).
Make it instantly clear to users what kind of help topic they're viewing by using a small icon at the top of the screen. There are four main types of help topics: Contents, Information, Commands and Procedures.
Whenever possible, keep each help topic to no more than a screen. Use pointers, pop-ups, secondary Windows, small type and variable paragraph spacing to keep topic size down.
Pepper your help file with screenshots if it is documenting an application. If you are producing a document or manual, use graphics such as charts, graphs or cartoons. Scanned photographs won't reproduce well because Windows help is limited to 4-bit color or a total of 16 colors/shades of gray.
Make your help file easier to use by taking advantage of the hot spot editor, which allows you to select sections of a graphic and assign them as jumps or pop-ups. Thus, you can take a screenshot graphic and make each of the buttons and dialog boxes on it a "hot spot." This takes up much less space in the help file than if you constructed a screen image from numerous separate graphics, each a hot spot. It's also more intuitive.
If you use a graphic multiple times in a help file, set all of the pointers in the file to the same graphic, rather than using multiple copies. This saves disk space when you compile the Help file.
You can use the title bar of your Help file for more than just the name of the file. If you're planning multiple versions of a Help file, make the date and version number part of the title, so a user can tell at a glance what version it is.
Need to explain something in your help file? Create a glossary entry and turn the word that needs to be explained into a pop-up hot-spot. Some tools allow you to easily place a "Glossary" button on the permanent WinHelp button bar at the top of the screen; this becomes a useful navigation tool.
The best titles for help topics are short phrases that begin with the "ing" form of a verb--like the heading above.
Since the search engine is one of Windows Help's greatest advantages over paper documentation, use it extensively. Add as many keywords to each subject as you can think of. If the subject is "Improving Disk Performance," list it under that name, as well as Disk, Performance, Improving and Disk Performance.
Even if you're writing a help file for Windows 3.1, you can do make it look better in Windows 95. If you have a group of related topics (Monitors, Color and Monitors, Monochrome, for example), separate the main topic and its subtopics with a colon. If you do so, when the file is displayed in Windows 95 (even if you compiled it as a Windows 3.x help file), the topics will appear like this:
Monitors
Color
Monochrome
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