What good alternatives to CHM are there for context sensitive help documents in desktop applications?

Question

We currently have a number of desktop applications (PowerBuilder, Winforms, WPF) that make use of a single CHM for context sensitive help. We'd like to move away from CHM as it's difficult to maintain but we've not found a suitable alternative. Ideally we'd like our developers to keep the help files up to date (perhaps in a wiki) as they add functionality and simply export this to PDF or something like that, but is it possible to use a PDF for context sensitive help, or are there any other promising alternative to CHM?

Answer 1

If you are finding CHM files difficult to produce, you probably aren't using the right tool. I would strongly recommend you take a look at Help & Manual, which can produce help in all the common modern formats from a single source base.

Answer 2

Not directly an answer, but a solution could be to access the CHMs using own code, and not over the windows api. Using the GNU chmspec CHM format description this is quite easy to do.

The Lazarus project (Lazarus.freepascal.org) follows this direction, and their tools can also write CHMs directly.

Answer 3

If you are looking for a free PDF tool to show helpfiles on the desktop, you might have a look at http://www.pdfhelp.org - then you can just use the PDF files.

Answer 4

None.

• You can possibly work with XML / Web stuff. With a decent framework possibly without loss of functionality. Lots of work though.

• CHM wwere retired, but sadly not really replaced for the use you have.