Creating New Topics

The first step in creating a Help file is to prepare the text. There are several ways to create text for the new topics. You can:

nType the topic text in Word for Windows (or other compatible editor).

While you are creating new material, you may want to keep the file in normal .DOC format until you are ready to compile the topics. Working in Word’s normal format is easier and saves time. When you are ready to build the Help file, you can save the topic text as RTF.

nImport one or more topics from an existing RTF topic file into a new topic file.

Word for Windows includes an RTF filter that can import or export RTF text. If you have files that are already in RTF or Word format, you can import them directly into Word and save them as new RTF topic files. To import just a portion of an RTF file, you can open the RTF file and copy the text you want to the Windows Clipboard and then paste it into the new topic file.

nImport text from any electronic document by converting its file format to a format readable by Word for Windows.

Word for Windows can import many types of word-processing files. If you have files that are not in RTF or Word format, you can import them into Word and save them as RTF files. Also, if your information has a consistent format, you can write automated conversion programs or Word macros to add the necessary RTF statements to the text document. Because the compiler expects valid RTF, if you import or generate invalid RTF, the topic files might fail to produce the results you expect.

nUse an optical character recognition (OCR) scanner to convert printed text to electronic form and import the resulting file into Word for Windows (or other compatible word processor).

Because printed manuals often serve as good source material for online documentation, you can scan the material if it does not exist in electronic form or if it cannot be converted to a compatible format. When saving the scanned file, ASCII (text-only format) is sufficient to import the file into Word for Windows.