PDF as interactive help?
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Now that I'm working at a Windows-clueless company, I've decided not to even fight the battle of using WinHelp for our online help system. Instead, I'll try to go with the flow and propose building on on-line help system based around Adobe Acrobat Reader. I've been looking over the SDK, and my guess is that it is powerful enough to do it.. but as always, it looks like it will take weeks of study to track down those nuggets I need. Does anyone have any experience interacting with Acrobat Reader - especially things like calling specific topics remotely? Sorry if this is too code-oriented..
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Now that I'm working at a Windows-clueless company, I've decided not to even fight the battle of using WinHelp for our online help system. Instead, I'll try to go with the flow and propose building on on-line help system based around Adobe Acrobat Reader. I've been looking over the SDK, and my guess is that it is powerful enough to do it.. but as always, it looks like it will take weeks of study to track down those nuggets I need. Does anyone have any experience interacting with Acrobat Reader - especially things like calling specific topics remotely? Sorry if this is too code-oriented..
Why would you want to inflict PDF on anyone? The viewer is appaling. Scroll from one page to the next with no warning whatsoever, so then you have to scroll back up to read what magically disappeared when it jumped pages. A truly awful product. Its a shame as Adobe's products are generally excellent. Stephen Kellett -- C++/Java/Win NT/Unix variants Memory leaks/corruptions/performance/system problems. UK based. Problems with RSI/WRULD? Contact me for advice.
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Why would you want to inflict PDF on anyone? The viewer is appaling. Scroll from one page to the next with no warning whatsoever, so then you have to scroll back up to read what magically disappeared when it jumped pages. A truly awful product. Its a shame as Adobe's products are generally excellent. Stephen Kellett -- C++/Java/Win NT/Unix variants Memory leaks/corruptions/performance/system problems. UK based. Problems with RSI/WRULD? Contact me for advice.
I agree completely! But the doc department is already knowledgable about PDF, and they are a bunch of Mac-heads; I no longer have the strength to fight the WinHelp battle. I've built some fantastic help systems myself, but I don't have the time to do that for this product. I think MS's abandonment of WinHelp was probably the beginning of their decline, at least in my eyes. They were 5 years ahead of the rest of the world in hypertext, but they never got the tools to a really usable point. Instead of improving teh system and documenting the file format, they dumped it for MediaViewer (or whatever that foul thing was that they used for MSDN) and now HTML help.