By: David Methvin
A lot of products are available for building Windows help files, but a recent import from Australia has some features that can build them better. Like many help-building tools, HDK is an add-on for Microsoft Word. It has a set of code, macros and templates that it uses to adapt Word for building help files. Except for Microsoft Word itself, the HDK package includes all the tools you need to build a complete Windows help file, including the Microsoft Help Compiler and Hotspot Graphics Editor. I did my testing with Word 6.0, but the manual says HDK works with Word 2.0 as well.
What particularly sets apart an HDK-built help file are its enhanced table of contents and indexing features. The table of contents is similar to Word's Outline view, and you can collapse or expand the headings to find the topic you're interested in. Indexing lets you create a full-text index of the words in a topic, so you can find related topics using Help's search option. These features can make it much easier to find what you want in a help file.
Making a new document from scratch is easy. Whenever you want to make a new topic or jump, you just highlight some text and click on a button on HDK's toolbar. One of the toolbar buttons brings up a project window that lets you control project options and invoke the help compiler to generate your help file. HDK also does well at converting an existing document to a help file. For my test, I took a large Word document, formatted with the Normal stylesheet. All I had to do was use HDK's stylesheet and run an automatic conversion routine. The routine converted the file's major headings to help topics and built a graphical table of contents that included the headings' hierarchy. HDK also lets you maintain a help file and the printed documentation as a single document. You can mark items so that they only appear in the printed manual and are not included in the help file. HDK has a standard way of handling Microsoft Word features in the transition between paper and screen: Glossary entries are transferred to an on
line glossary, footnotes become pop-up windows, bookmarks become hypertext jumps and index entries are used for the help file's search feature. HDK also will automatically remove some features, like borders on tables, that aren't supported by the help compiler.
Once you've got a good-sized help file, the process of converting it to RTF format and compiling it with the help compiler can be time consuming. Some other help tools have included features that let you test links inside Word before compiling, but HDK has an even better method. Since you often just want to get an idea of how the topic you're working on is going to look, HDK lets you compile only the current topic. You get to see exactly what that topic will look like without waiting for a complete compile. If you click on a hot spot on the page, you'll get a pop-up telling you where it would have jumped had you compiled the entire file.
If there's any drawback to HDK, it's the tool's user interface. There are some inconsistencies in the way things work, and it took me a while to find my way to the program functions that I wanted to try. Everything I tested did work, though, and once you've learned the incantations they're just a minor distraction.
Fortunately, there are plenty of aids to get you over the learning curve. The paper documentation provides an overview of HDK's abilities and shows you how to create a simple help file from scratch. As you might expect from a help tool, the online help has the real meat of the documentation.
Info File
HDK 2.5
Price: $395
In Brief: This Microsoft Word add-on lets you build Windows help files that have a hierarchical table of contents and full-text search capabilities.
Disk Space Required: 5MB
System Resources: 18% (Word 6.0 and HDK)
RAM: 1.5MB
DEK Software International
609-424-6565, fax 609-424-0785