Progress
Help Development
Guide


Organizing Help Topics

Before writing any help text or entering any control codes, you, as the help author, must develop a basic organizational plan for your help system.

If you already have a printed manual, use the Table of Contents as a guide for creating the contents file, which contains the information that populates the Contents tab of the Help Topics dialog box. You can nest second-level book icons inside first-level book icons to represent a hierarchical organization of the material in the help file. This approach allows the user to navigate easily to the appropriate topic.

The individual help topics in the help file can contain any number of popup links and jumps. The user can view definitions and jump to other topics that provide more detailed information about the current subject or information about a related subject. Keywords and browse sequences provide users additional ways to access help information.

Because help supports both text and graphics as jumps, you can also create a pictorial help topic using, for example, a schematic diagram, floor plan, or other diagram with hypertext links to related topics.

Help topic information can often be derived from printed documentation. If you already have a printed manual for your application, you can save time by using the source files created for the manual as the starting point for your online help system. Your first step is to reorganize the information into modular help topics. Then you can add hypertext links that allow the user to access these modular information chunks in a nonlinear fashion.

Figure 2–9 illustrates the difference between the way printed documentation is organized and the way online help is organized.

Figure 2–9: Printed Documentation Versus Online Help

If you have no printed documentation to use as the source of the help text, you have to plan and outline the steps that are normally involved in creating a manual. But there are some important differences involved in creating a successful online help system. The following section briefly discusses some general guidelines to use when organizing and creating help topics.


Copyright © 2004 Progress Software Corporation
www.progress.com
Voice: (781) 280-4000
Fax: (781) 280-4095