Several projects I worked on recently for a small financial solutions provider involved creating small utility programs in the Providex programming language. One of the requirements was to create end user documentation for these applications. We wanted to be able to produce both printed documentation and HTML help from a single source document. We also needed to document some internal business processes.

We did some research and ultimately bought a shrink wrapped software package from ComponentOne called Doc-To-Help. The idea behind Doc-To-Help is that you can use Microsoft Office Word to produce documentation for multiple target formats from a single source document.

Doc-To-Help is a vast product with many features. I managed to produce the required documentation using Doc-To-Help and Word. It took a great deal of tinkering and reading documentation to get the results we wanted. I have to say that ease of use was not one of Doc-To-Help’s strengths. Continue reading ›