The feel good factor!

Hi Rajdeep,
Thanks for that elaborate reply. It really helped a lot! Actually my company is of a medium size and I am the only TW here.At times, it gets difficult for me to learn new things. Even to begin with them. I feel that weird thing called Writer's block, which actually is a *technical* writer's block. I know what is to be written and how, but I
don't know how to present it and in which format! TWIN and seniors like you are making life easier for me.
I took a lot of keywords from your mail and googled them for more info. Got quite a lot. Thanks again for being so supportive. I hope I didn't annoy you with such basic questions.

Thanks and Warm Regards,
Mugdha

-----Original Message-----
From: Rajdeep Gupta [mailto:holypriest1@lycos.com]
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2006 10:27 AM
To: Mugdha Kulkarni
Subject: Re: [twin] Process for creating Application Help

Mugdha,

I hope you have gone through the links that Guruji has send across to it.Anyway, I'ld like to share a little insight on Help Application, primarily due to the reason that I actively started my Technical Writing career developing online help application and than scaled up doing other things.Please see my responses in-line.

Is there any standard process for generating Application Help?
Rajdeep:yes, there is. Based on the requirement set fort, an Online help is developed to cater the online audience. So, in general, you'll have the following things in your help--welcome note, about the help, audience of the help, logging into the application/system (since it's an online help,), features and task centric wise, Index and a question tag. Note that the help will have more screenshots than a PDF document has.

What are the steps that you guys generally follow?
Rajdeep: I'll tell you how I develop an Online Help. Primarily using Robohelp HTML, I import the Word document into the Robohelp application and the generate the Help. You can use Robohtml tutorials to get more insight on it.

What all comes as an input and in what format you are supposed to deliver the output?
Rajdeep: If you are using Robohelp, you can have multiple help outputs aka Webhelp, javahelp, flash help,webhelp pro, Oracle Help, WinHelp 2000,WinHelp 4 and WinHelp 3.

Who are the other professionals involved in this process?
Rajdeep: So far I have come across, I have worked with the developers for generating Online Help. The developers take all the map ids that each html file and corresponds it to the application for context-sensitive help. The quality assurance team will come later for testing the documentation.

What are the available tools and when do you choose each one of them?
Rajdeep: Using htmlhelp workshop(free tool), Roohelp, Madcap and etc you can generated online help. If you want to purchase a tool, I suggest Madcap or Robohelp.

Hope this helps!
Rajdeep