Need Advice For Book

[Michael]

I've written a manual with various points of information that in some form or fassion relate to one another. (I used the Word Manual template).

I'm trying to find a solution to allow a reader to search the manual and have all realted topics pull up similar to how a Help Screen works. The "Find" function in Word is not sufficient becasue it finds a word or phrase and then the reader has to scroll through too many page to look at them all.

For example, if I type in "FILE", I might expect to see several topics listed such as
File - Save
File - Import
File - Delete
at this point, I would like to be able to click on the topic and be taken to that text.

Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I'm trying to find a solution to allow a reader to search the manual and
have all realted topics pull up similar to how a Help Screen works.
--------------------------------snip----------------------------------<

Sounds to me like you need a document with interactive hyperlinks, so that
you can call up a scrolling list of related topics -- exactly like a Help
Screen.

The easiest way I know how to do this (aside from getting a developer license
from Apple for their Help Viewer engine) is to create a PDF document with
built-in indexing, hyperlinks, and related topics in the Table of Contents
and an Index at the end.

I've seen this done with a variety of software manuals, and it's quite
effective. Unfortunately, Adobe Acrobat 6.0 is kind of a hog when it comes
to system resources, and it runs somewhat slowly under Mac OSX (even on a
fast G5), but I expect that will improve over time. But Acrobat is a
terrific program for creating a user manual that can double as an online Help
file.

--MFW

 

[Michael]

Thanks Marc, that pretty muched confirmed the path I took. I was looking at Adobe since it is so widely distributed but I was unsure about the feature that I was wanting to use (like a help system). My other option was using Microsoft's WinHelp. I downloaded Microsoft WinHelp Work Shop (Help File Compiler) and so far it looks like it might be the answer.

Now I just I have to find a resource for specific information on how to build those pesky Topic RTF files.