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Für die Erstellung von Online-Hilfen gibt es zahlreiche spezialisierte Editoren und Konverter, sogenannte "Help Authoring Tools", kurz HATs. Viele dieser Werkzeuge bieten heute auch Möglichkeiten zum Single Source Publishing, d.h. sie können mehrere Ausgabeformate und Varianten aus einer gemeinsamen Textquelle heraus generieren. Währen die meisten Tools die Generierung verschiedener Online-Formate (z.B. Browser-basierte Hilfen, kompilierte Online-Hilfen) sehr gut beherrschen, sind nur wenige Tools in der Lage, auch gedruckte Handbücher (oder PDF) in professioneller Qualität zu erzeugen. Große Unterschiede zwischen den Tools zeigen sich auch, wenn es um die Übersetzung Ihrer Projekte in Fremdsprachen geht.
Die folgende Checkliste kann Ihnen bei der Entscheidung helfen, welches Help Authoring Tool Ihren spezifischen Anforderungen am besten entspricht.
Tipp:
Eine Liste empfehlenswerter Programme finden Sie unter dem Thema Autorenwerkzeuge für Online-Hilfen.
 Beitrag in englischer Sprache
Dieser Beitrag richtet sich an ein internationales Publikum und ist ausschließlich in englischer Sprache verfügbar. Er ist jedoch so geschrieben, dass er auch für Nicht-Muttersprachler einfach zu verstehen ist. Bitte lesen Sie weiter...
The primary differentiating characteristic of the help authoring tools on the market today is the question of where and how the writer puts together his texts and formats them.
| ▪ | Tools with an integrated editor
The majority of help authoring tools have their own fully integrated WYSIWYG editor. |
Advantage: Texts and meta-information can be created and managed together. There will be no additional licence costs for an external editor.
Disadvantage: The integrated editors often do not provide the same comfort and efficiency as the major text processors. If you want to use macros or autotext, for example, you will often have to use a third-party utility.
| ▪ | Tools with an external editor |
Other tools follow the contrary approach and use an external editor for creating the texts – mostly Microsoft Word, but also, to an increasing extent, FrameMaker, HTML editors, or XML editors.
Advantage: You can use all functions of your favorite editor.
Disadvantage: Often, inefficient and complex operation. Also, since the source data are mostly loaded with additional meta-information (e.g. in the form of hidden texts or with the help of field functions), the translation process becomes particularly error prone. Add to this the typical, well-known problems of the various editors. For instance, those who are reluctant to work with Microsoft Word will never be happy with a tool that integrates Microsoft Word.
In this group, text creation and help generation are largely decoupled. Complete manuals (mostly written with Microsoft Word or FrameMaker) will be converted into online help only in the second step. The basis for formatting is almost always a specific template, which must be adhered to strictly while writing the texts. Moreover, even here, often some additional meta-information will have to be incorporated in the text.
Advantage: This procedure allows for efficient single source publishing especially if the material already exists in the form of printable manuals.
Disadvantage: The book metaphor can mislead the author easily into writing contents that are not as modular as required for online help. The result often are "screen manuals" instead of media-adapted online help.
Other converters are based on XML-DITA. This avoids the disadvantages listed above, as it forces the author to develop a modular , online-ready structure right from the beginning.
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Support for translations?
If online help needs to be Unicode-compatible for certain languages, this will restrict the choice of tools. Not all programs support Unicode. There are also significant differences in the translation workflow. Many tools completely ignore translation requirements. Others provide sophisticated export and import options for texts that are to be sent out to external translators, or allow the author to edit several languages in parallel.
Multiple-author support?
Unlike with content management systems, only a few of the classical help authoring tools explicitly support the simultaneous editing by several authors.
In some cases this can also be achieved manually to a certain extent at the file level, but this does only work for the tools that save each topic into an individual file.
Genuine single source publishing?
The majority of tools claim to support single source publishing, which means creating texts once, and then publishing to different formats and media. As long as these are just different help formats, such as compiled help or browser-based help, this usually works smoothly. But when it comes to also generating printable manuals or PDFs, this is what separates the grain from the chaff:
| ▪ | Is it possible to fine-tune the formatting of the exported documents? Many tools, for instance, do not export the names of paragraph and character styles. Thus, it becomes hardly feasible to achieve a professional print layout automatically. |
| ▪ | Is it possible to automatically eliminate or insert media-typical text fragments, such as "on page" or "in chapter"? |
| ▪ | Can the export be restricted to specific contents? |
Single source publishing acquires one more dimension if documentation not only for different media but also for different product versions have to be generated from the same source, like for a standard-version and a pro-version, for example. Some tools allow you to define so-called conditional texts or build flags to hide specific sections of the text as required. Another important feature are variables and text snippets (sometimes also called embedded topics) which allow you to use individual text sections many times over, such as product names or a warning, for example.
Documentation of source code?
Some tools have specialized on code, assembly and component documentation. They scan the source code and automatically generate a completely linked basic framework for the documentation. Citations from the source code will be formatted automatically (syntax highlighting feature).
Manual formatting?
Many low-cost tools can prove to be a costly exercise when a project grows lager than initially expected, or when it has to be revised later on. Most low-cost tools do not support definable paragraph and character styles and format each word manually. If a global change to the layout becomes necessary later, then comes the rude awakening.
Only for those who only need to create a small online help occasionally and do not have to maintain and update this help file regularly, a low-cost solution will truly be an economical alternative.
Control over the HTML code?
Although all current help formats are backed by the source format HTML, only a few tools give you full control over the generated HTML, JavaScript and CSS-code. Here you will have to make a fundamental decision: Do you want to be able to tune the code manually, or are you rather looking for a tool that will spare you from most technical details?
Other aspects
And finally, here are some small, but quite often decisive questions regarding performance, efficiency, and the scope of functions:
| ▪ | Is there support for advanced navigation aids such as expandable sections, breadcrumb trail, related-topic-links, mini TOCs? |
| ▪ | Is it possible to call browser-based help in a context sensitive way? Or will it be only the home page (index.html) that appears? |
| ▪ | How easy is it to import legacy data from other tools? |
| ▪ | What other useful functions does the software provide? Some tools for instance, come with useful add-ons, such as screen capture utilities or tools for image processing. |
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