Is H&M your first HAT?

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Is H&M your first HAT?

H&M4 is my first HAT
42
32%
H&M was my first HAT and I've used it since earlier versions
31
24%
I switched from RoboHelp
22
17%
I switched from Doc2Help
5
4%
I switched from ForeHelp
11
8%
I switched from Help Scribble
4
3%
I switched from Flare
3
2%
I switched from AuthorIT
0
No votes
I switched from another HAT
13
10%
 
Total votes: 131

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Tim Green
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Is H&M your first HAT?

Unread post by Tim Green »

How did you come to Help & Manual? Is it your first (HAT) help authoring tool or did you switch to it from another tool or method of producing help?
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Martin Wynne
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Location: West of the Severn, UK

Re: Is H&M your first HAT?

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Tim Green wrote:How did you come to Help & Manual? Is it your first (HAT) help authoring
tool or did you switch to it from another tool or method of producing help?
Hi Tim,

I was using HelpScribble. H&M was getting high praise on a Delphi programming
forum, so I gave it a try. No contest!

That was HM3 of course. I do wonder if I would have been equally enthusiastic
if my first contact had been with HM4. HM3 was clearly aimed at software
developers wanting to add Help to their products, whereas HM4 has shifted
more towards the needs of professional authors. I ain't one of those! If I'd come
across HM4 and found I couldn't search and replace fonts (as we could in HM3)
and use the function keys as formatting macros, I think I would have discarded it.

I've learned to live with the new way of working, but I still don't like it. I find I'm
using HM4 less often than I used to use HM3, which was great as an odd-job HTML
generator, and I still use it for that. In HM4 there is a sense of the full works or
nothing, with all that CSS stuff whether you want it or not.

regards,

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: Is H&M your first HAT?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Martin,
Martin Wynne wrote:If I'd come across HM4 and found I couldn't search and replace fonts
Don't despair, Search and Replace Fonts is going to be back and stronger than ever in version 4.2 in June. :)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Martin Wynne
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Location: West of the Severn, UK

Re: Is H&M your first HAT?

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Tim Green wrote:Don't despair, Search and Replace Fonts is going to be back and stronger
than ever in version 4.2 in June. :)
Hi Tim,

Very pleased to hear it. :) It was a mystery to me why it was ever dropped.

While we are restoring useful HM3 features, please can we also have overwrite
mode in the editor (so very useful when using templates for lists and tables),
and that indispensible single click to insert a half-height line of white space
between paragraphs?

regards,

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: Is H&M your first HAT?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Martin,
Martin Wynne wrote:Very pleased to hear it. :) It was a mystery to me why it was ever dropped.
Just to clarify this: It wasn't dropped. With H&M3's styles, which were really just formatting macros, providing a search and replace formatting function was quite a simple matter. In H&M4 it is very different. The dynamic styles with inheritance and the new and much more powerful editor make providing this feature in H&M4 a much, much more complex undertaking. It simply wasn't possible to provide it in the original release.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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Olivier Beltrami
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Re: Is H&M your first HAT?

Unread post by Olivier Beltrami »

Tim Green wrote:How did you come to Help & Manual? Is it your first (HAT) help authoring tool or did you switch to it from another tool or method of producing help?
I switched from D2H in December 2000. After spending (literally) thouands of dollars on D2H 1.5, then 1.6, then 1.61, then D2H 2000, ... it was amazing that H&M 2 could do thing so much better at a fraction of the price.
Olivier Beltrami
https://www.qppstudio.net
Worldwide Public Holidays and Calendar Data
Byron S.
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2003 8:16 pm
Location: San Jose, California

Unread post by Byron S. »

I started with FrameMaker and using WebWorks to covert to HTML. It worked. So did starting an automobile with a hand crank.
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Dean Whitlock
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Unread post by Dean Whitlock »

A sample of only 22 can't be statistically significant. Any idea how many H&M users there are total? Or is that classified marketing information? :wink:

I came to H&M from Word (with Acrobat to output PDFs) and Homesite to produce some browser-based help. I was a tech writer who drifted into marketing/PR (where I used Word with Pagemaker) so missed the earlier conversions everyone else seemed to be going through in the late 90s and early 00s. I don't have any other HAT to compare H&M to, and don't feel I need it. H&M does what I need it to do, and then some.

I can understand Martin's frustration, though. I always felt Word was far too complicated for my needs, and it just kept getting worse. I started out on WordPerfect in the pre-mouse days of the digital pleistocene. Actually, I started out with text editors using .nroff and .lroff, code-based format scripting languagues, and the introduction of HTML was definitely a case of deja vu! I could live without a mouse, but I wouldn't want to go back to .nroff. At home, working on my novels, I use Appleworks, which is perfect for manuscript formatting - it's a matter of using the right tool for the right job. Word tries to be everything to everybody, and fails. Hopefully, EC will know better than to go that route.
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Alexander Halser
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Unread post by Alexander Halser »

I've learned to live with the new way of working, but I still don't like it. I find I'm
using HM4 less often than I used to use HM3, which was great as an odd-job HTML
generator, and I still use it for that. In HM4 there is a sense of the full works or
nothing, with all that CSS stuff whether you want it or not.
Hi Martin,
As Tim mentioned, style replace will be re-implemented, as a "make-formatted-text-a-style" throughout a project. Apart from that, I cannot think of anything that has become worse in version 4. HM4 has excellent table support (still a mess in version 3) and you don't have to use styles, if you don't want to.
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
Lars @ Danware
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed May 10, 2006 10:07 am
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark

RoboHelp and FrameMaker

Unread post by Lars @ Danware »

I started out struggeling with FrameMaker (and getting it nice for print) and RoboHelp (and getting it nice for the net).
I spent countless hours in the Dungeon of Transformation ...

Now, I can concentrate on developing instead of managing - cool
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dempseypat
Posts: 79
Joined: Tue May 16, 2006 6:55 am
Location: Pismo Beach, CA, USA

RoboHelp and DocToHelp aka D2H

Unread post by dempseypat »

I used RoboHelp from V2 through X5 (about 10 years). Then about a year ago, after RoboHelp sold, I got nervious and switeched to D2H because we were starting a massive new project.

After about 4 hours of using H&M, I feel I know as much as I knew about RoboHelp after 10 years. It's that intuitive.

D2H was another story completely. It was a struggle from the beginning. What comes to mind is "By Programmers For Programmers". The problem is, programmers can't usually write good help. The help files for D2H are proof of that. They can't really be understood by mere mortals. They use property sheets instead of dialog boxes and it's very easy to fall into traps. We had a space in our CHM help file. It prevented jumps to other topics from inside help called from the program. We finally figured out that it was the space after wasting about 50 hours with their support which was pretty useless. Their answer was to switch to browser help.

We switched the CHM over from D2H but lost the internal links. It's a small price to pay for the ease of use and intuitive power of H&M.

Good job guys.
Pat
Carolyn Duangprom
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Location: Cape Town, South Africa
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Unread post by Carolyn Duangprom »

My previous employer had Robohelp, which was my first experience using a HAT. When I started as the first tech writer at my current employer, they needed a HAT and I had to investigate the options - While doing research I came across H & M (there was a comparative article on various HATS at a techwriters forum). I downloaded the demo, created a test project, and liked the product. We bought Professional, and I've since recommended it on other forums. The first client I created a project for also bought H&M to manage their own help going forward. Criteria I used was to compare it to RH because I couldnt afford a steep learning curve, and my technical skills are limited (working on that though). So H & M definitely works for me and 9 months later I don't have any complaints. What I really needed as well was good support and that's readily available through this forum.
I'm impressed and happy - keep it up!
Trevor Holder
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri Oct 20, 2006 2:13 pm
Location: Adelaide South Australia

First time user of H & M

Unread post by Trevor Holder »

I am a non literate when it comes to programming but have been testing proprietry software for the past 12 years and have been writing help manuals in word and then they were converted to .CHM with Robo Help by another person. This caused problems with styling.
I was asked by our programmer to find a good Help Tool as we have 3 new pieces of software under development and researched some 15 odd until I found H&M.
I liked it right from the start because of it's intuitiveness and the fact that we wrote once and could export in multiple formats. The biggest plus for me is that the programmer fell in love with it as well (believe me he is hard to convince sometimes)
While I amd still finding my way around I am finding it very easy to work with.

Exploring the forums is helping me understand more and more.
Thanks for a Job well done in creating H & M. :D
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C.Trautmann
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2006 3:19 pm
Location: Aalen - Germany

Unread post by C.Trautmann »

As I started 3 month ago as Technical Writer, I also had my first touch with things like "Help Authoring", "HelpandManuel" or "EC-Software"...H&M 3 was already installed, but nobody knows about the function in my company^^

After some days I recognized that there is some NEW and BETTER version with MILLIONS of NEW FUNCTIONS...how the advertising described, and I could convince my boss to buy me this stuff (he still dont know about the function).

So I had no chance to test some other programms, but all in all I'm pleased, also If a man from the grafic-design-section with InDesign and Co. has his problems with the fact that documentation dont have to be a work of art... :wink: #

But its a fact that the support is the best I've ever seen in the "for-free-section", the only comulation would be to have the privat phone number of TIM :lol:

Best regards, Christoph Trautmann
TomHenehan
Posts: 65
Joined: Wed Jul 17, 2002 7:45 pm
Location: New Orleans, LA USA

Unread post by TomHenehan »

After twenty years working as a typesetter (and typesetting supervisor/manager, and eventually type shop owner), I had to find a new career and eventually found myself writing user documentation for this small specialized software company. Until a very late date, the products were DOS-based and all the documentation was made available in print form only. I inherited a set of MSWord files to be edited, and eventually began creating new douments in Word as well.

When the company finally made the very belated move to Windows-based code, it became obvious that we would have to begin providing our user instructions in on-screen "Help System" form. The decision to purchase H&M in 2001 (or maybe early '02) was not mine, and was based almost entirely on price. I certainly had no experience with, or knowledge of, other authoring tools, and the higher-ups who made the purchase were even less knowledgable than I.

I think we were incredibly lucky ~ I was incredibly lucky ~ to have stumbled upon H&M. It fulfills our every need at very economical price, and the support couldn't be better.

Incidentally, today is my first day back on the job in over a year and a half, since Hurricane Katrina. My position is no longer full-time and I'm not on the regular payroll; the company is still in recovery mode, and so am I. I hope to get a new and better full-time position elsewhere before long, but will probably continue to work here evenings and weekends to earn a nice second income. Largely because of the long hiatus, I'm still using H&M version 3, which seems to be perfectly OK for now. The company may or may not decide to upgrade; I may or may not see fit to buy a copy for myself if I see a future in freelance tech writing. Only the future will tell!
Tom Henehan
CompuVend, Inc.
Makers of DEX Buzz Box®
3322 Hessmer Avenue, Suite 201
Metairie, LA 70002
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