Alternatives to MS-Word & Doc-To-Help?

The development of AbaDoc was not always easy and caused several severe problems. The main reason for this were the used tools: Microsoft Word and Doc-To-Help. Remember that AbaDoc is based on WinWord 95 (7.0) which means WordBasic and not yet VBA in Word. (VBA was only introduced in Word 97.)

Alternative Tools

The set of available tools can be divided into three groups:

Lots of stand-alone tools to create Windows Help are available; Borland's ForeHelp is one of them. All of them had two major disadvantages for our application:

	They are very "HLP-centric" and not aware of possibly different targets than just Windows HLP
	They are not customisable to the extent needed for this application

Their are some other tools which extend Word in a way similar to how Doc-To-Help does; RoboHelp is one of them:

	Many of them (including RoboHelp) are too HLP-centric as well
	others simply don't provide all the features D2H does

An alternative for Word would have been any other windows based word processor, such as for example Word-Perfect. This did not make sense, because:

	No MakeHLP Tools are available for those
	Macro-programming on these programs (where available) is conceptually not very different from Word
	Our Users were already familiar with MS-Word


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