Linking the Program to its Help System

For software documentation, your published Help file will usually be distributed along with the program it describes. The people who develop the program need to make sure that the program knows how to open your Help file. This varies depending on which development tool is used, and the developer documentation for the tool will contain full instructions. You may also want to refer them to the user documentation for the Windows Help and HTML Help Workshop programs and to the Help Authoring Guide. These are all available from Microsoft free of charge.

Context-Sensitive Help

If you are implementing context-sensitive Help, then the application developer needs to specify which topic inside the Help file to open when the user clicks on a certain field in a certain screen of the program. This is done by passing numbers or characters from the program to the Help file.

Either:

• The developer will give you a list of these "Context IDs" that have been included in the program, and then you have to tell Author-it those numbers before you publish the final Help system.

  -or-

• You can give the developer the list of Topic IDs that are part of your Help file. By default, these are based on the unique ID number for the topic within Author-it, so they're easy to keep track of.