Re: WinHelp

[James Robertson <jamesr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 17:57 28/07/97 -0400, you wrote:
  | I was just downloading a WinHelp equivalent of a PDF document and I
  | wondered: "how far is Jade from being able to support WinHelp?" I know
  | that the winhelp compiler's input format is RTF, but I also know that
  | RTF is a family of poorly defined languages. Does anybody know what it
  | would take?
  | 
  | Microsoft is eventually going to move Windows over to HTML, so it
  | wouldn't be worth a lot of effort, but in the meantime WinHelp is more
  | convenient than HTML in many ways. I'm not yet sure how Microsoft
  | intends to implement WinHelp's features in HTML which does not have rich
  | enough semantics for some of it.

Personally, I would definitely prefer HTML over WinHelp. In fact, I
created a comparison document for a client last week, and I could only
find one technical advantage for WinHelp. The only other 'pluses' for
WinHelp were related to the wide level of support for it as a help
format.

Other than that, HTML has superior display capabilities in almost
every area (see tables, for example).

But back to your original question: I would not consider it an easy
thing to create WinHelp-style RTF. For a start, there are at least
two different WinHelp compilers (Win31 and Win95), which have
different capabilities and input file formats.

Then, the format of the RTF file is pretty convoluted, and poorly-
defined.

But yes, it would seem to be possible ...

Cheers,

J


-------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs
Newton & SGML Consultancy
jamesr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Beyond the Idea"

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