For software documentation, your published Help file will usually be distributed along with the application it describes. Developers of the application need to make sure that it's able to open your Help file. Methods for opening the Help file vary, depending on which development tool you used; developer documentation for the tool will contain full instructions. You may also want to refer developers to the user documentation for the Windows Help and HTML Help Workshop programs, and to the Help Authoring Guide.
Context-sensitive help
If you are implementing context-sensitive Help, the application developer needs to specify which topic inside the Help file to open when the user clicks on a certain field in a certain screen of the application. This is done by passing numbers or characters from the application to the Help file.
Either:
- The developer will give you a list of these "Context IDs" that have been included in the application, you have to provide Author-it with those numbers before you publish the final Help system.
-or-
- You can give the developer the list of "Topic IDs" that are part of your Help file. By default, these are based on the unique ID number for the topic within Author-it, so they're easy to keep track of.