Creating Help Files for SubAssembly Composser

[KPerison]

Hello,

I want to start creating help files for the SA's I'm producing.  I've downloaded the Microsoft Help Workshop program and began watching a few videos and tutorials on how to create the .CHM files from scratch.  However, "from scratch" sounds like too much work!! 😞 

Anyhow, is there some way to use one of the existing SubAssembly help files as a template for my new SA's?  Or is there a sample/template Project file (.hhp) out there to use as a starting point.  I would like to get the same format, fonts, headings, tables, etc  as the existing SA help files.

Thanks.

[mathewkol]

Help these days is generally HTML. Not too many CHM's out there anymore. I create mine in Word and save to HTML.

[michael.robertson · Accepted solution]

There are some programs out there that will "decompile" a chm back to an HTML help project, not sure if there are any free ones though. Adobe Robohelp & Madcap Flair are paid programs I've used in the past for this purpose.

We use Word to make .mht files (basically a zipped up html file with all the resources such as images compressed into a single file), we then use "Precision Helper" to compile the chm. Precision Helper is a freeware program that you can make a donation if you like it.

We ended up making our own template to use with a similar layout but using a different color scheme so that you can easily tell when you've hit a help topic for a Autodesk SA or one of our custom SAs.

[KPerison]

As a test, I copy and pasted the Help page from the stock "RetainWall_Vertical" SA into Word. Then saved it as HTML. I then selected that new HTML inside SAC as my help file. When I imported the SA into C3D and checked the help, none of the images were brought along.