I originally found VyperHelp as a result of a search for a solution to moving my HPJ format Windows help files to HTML format so that I could take advantage of the universal accessibility of HTML and make them available on my website, and also because I wanted to significantly update and add to the help, and I was tired of the cumbersome process of creating help files in Microsoft Word.

Installation

Getting Started with VyperHelp

My first import didn't go as well as I would have liked, apparently my RTF source files had become somewhat overcomplicated over the years of editing them with Microsoft Word for Windows 2. Vyperhelp Converter was able to transfer all the text, but many of the bitmaps and links ended up getting dropped from the resulting VyperHelp VYD file. It would have been a lot of work to redo all of those, so I consulted MekTek tech support. I got a lot of help and suggestions from Mat Kramer, the author of VyperHelp, but I finally found the solution on my own. I loaded up a copy of Word 97, read in and saved my RTF file sources, and afterwards VyperHelp was able to translate the files perfectly. Apparently the newer version of Word took out a lot of extra and unnecessary formatting information inserted by Word 2, resulting in files that were easier to parse. As anyone familiar with RTF will explain, it is more art than an exact science.

Once I had the source files massaged, I did one other little trick, I rearranged the order of the RTF source files in the HPJ file so that all of the main subjects were in the order I wanted them to appear in the final help file.

Editing with VyperHelp

Moving topics around is easy, there are hotkeys which allow you to move a topic, or branch of topics up or down, and even to promote or demote branches. It took me about half an hour to rearrange the 115 or so help sections I had.

One of the things that I really like about VyperHelp is that there are hotkeys for everything. Once you learn the program, you don't have to spend any time looking through menus to get to commonly needed operations such as inserting links.

Editing the help topics is straightforward. Enter your text, set the fonts, do whatever layout work you need to do, insert pictures where you need them, and move on to the next topic. VyperHelp has a particularly nice feature for translators which allows you to easily insert symbols and accented characters into the text. My only criticism is that although VyperHelp Editor is WYSIWYG, it always shows the markup tags such as font change boundaries and end of line characters which I find distracting. It would be nice if these could be turned off and on.

Producing INF and Help Files

Producing HTML

The single HTML file is not my favourite layout since it basically flattens the hierarchy of help topics you create using VyperHelp, but you may need to use it if you have users who are limited to 8.3 filenames, I'll talk about why next.

I really love the frames version of the HTML help files created by VyperHelp. This creates a 2 pane document, the left pane is either the table of contents or an index, and the right contains the text of the section you are interested in. You can see what this looks like at http://www.aurora-systems.com/manual/index.html This is really slick, I've gotten a lot of really positive feedback from my users on this. The one limitation of the frames version is that you can't specify an .htm extension so that you can make the filenames fit onto an 8.3 drive.

Support

Wish List

The other feature that would be nice is a way to import long text documents easily into VyperHelp. Currently if you have a document such as a manual that you want to bring into VyperHelp, you have to create the sections in VyperHelp, then use cut and paste to fill each section with text. An automated way to do this, even if it involved some special markup in the source text, would be helpful.

Summary