Using RoboHelp to Create Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0

Hi,

We finally started working on this as well.

Using the mshcmigrate utility, the developers were able to take the chm and create the help system in Help Viewer 1.1 format.

The only issue was that the viewer couldn't handle more than one entry in the TOC pointing to the same topic. We got rid of double entries and it worked.

However, our Help is a merged Help with 5 CHMs (created in RoboHelp 9). The utility worked on each CHM, but the developers had to manually "change the TOC parent's ID of the children CHM from -1 to the ID of the parent CHM" (which would have to be done each time we generate new CHMs). Plus, a bigger issue is that the links between CHMs are not working.

We do use our source files to create a combined XML Output of all of the 5 projects and it works fine on the Web, including the cross-project links (http://devnet.magicsoftware.com/en/library).

Regarding your step 1, what do you mean by "Create your help system... in well-formed, xhtml page format"? I tried taking the XML Outputs of our projects, but this didn't work.

Has anyone else had to convert merged CHM projects into Help Viewer 1.1 format?

Hi, dsarig (& Peter),

I've been charged with the same task - create an application's help system in Help Viewer 1.0 format, and not a Help 1.0 or 2.0 format. From my research I've determine the following:

The basic steps to creating a Help Viewer 1.x format is as follows:

1. Create your help system (or "help file") in well-formed, xhtml page format (this is preferred because xhtml best supports the Unicode characterset and the file is validated against improper tag-nesting issues).
2. Encrypt (zip) the help system into a standard .zip file using any standard tool (e.g., Winzip), then rename the extension from .zip to .mshc.
3. Open the .mshc file in your Help Viewer, which will decrypt and display your help system properly.

That's about it.

I'm also working on creating a digitally signed .CAB file, I'll post my findings if you're interested in that, too.

Best regards,

RoboHelp 9.0 | VS2010

There is no built in layout for this new viewer and I haven't looked at it or seen anything from RoboHelp users.

If I were to look at it, where I would start is a very small RoboHelp project with less than ten topics and generate webhelp so that I had topics in a browser ready format. Then I would be looking to find out what needs to be done in Visual Studio to pull that together for the help viewer.

I am not saying it will work, simply that as I understand it you need browser ready topics so you would use some HTML editor. Above would be how I would try getting what I wanted from RoboHelp.

Good luck and we would be interested to hear how you get on.

Good sources of information would be Rob Chandler's http://www.helpware.net and http://thirdblogfromthesun.com/

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge