Complete newbie - skins? What are they?

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Dave Gehman
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Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Complete newbie - skins? What are they?

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

I can't find any examples of help files made with H&M PP skins (that I know of). Does anyone have one that I can look at?

I'm trying to divine what PP skins do and how they provide infrastructure for the kind of help outputs that H&M is known for.

I'm used to "skin" as meaning an overlay that presents integrated look & feel setting (colors, layout, swooshes, flashy things, blinky things), acting more as a bit of bling than something with real world meaning -- a pretty picture frame, so to speak. Is that how 'skin' is used in the H&M world?

Not that I don't want bling. I have a project just underway that we want to make appeal to millennials and intelligent but stylish / hip college students... and the plain jane CHM help won't cut it...

Thanks for any help,
Dave
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Tim Green
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Re: Complete newbie - skins? What are they?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Dave,
Dave Gehman wrote:I can't find any examples of help files made with H&M PP skins (that I know of). Does anyone have one that I can look at?

For a start, you can check out the online version of the Premium Pack's own help.
I'm used to "skin" as meaning an overlay that presents integrated look & feel setting (colors, layout, swooshes, flashy things, blinky things), acting more as a bit of bling than something with real world meaning -- a pretty picture frame, so to speak. Is that how 'skin' is used in the H&M world?
Yes, but also quite a bit more. In addition to that HM skins can (and in the PP skins do) provide advanced additional functionality, like the ability to embed the help in existing web pages, display topics overlaid on your own pages with hyperlinks without having to display the entire help or take the user away to a different page or tab (see here), provide support for session variables and your own code (see here). There are also other things, like a Wordpress plugin, massively accelerated browsing with dynamic content replacement, really usable responsive display on phones and support for solving problems with tables and images on phones and lots more.

In addition to all this, this is now also available in the new EWriter format, which can be used to replace CHM. It combines the benefits of WebHelp and CHM and eliminates the disadvantages of both.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Dave Gehman
Posts: 575
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Re: Complete newbie - skins? What are they?

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

Thanks very much, Tim
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