Smart HLP 2 RTF

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What is Smart HLP 2 RTF?

Smart HLP 2 RTF is a tool to convert Windows Help files (*.hlp) to Rtf format files directly. It is designed to create printable,manual-quality RTF format documents or recompilable projects from Microsoft Windows Help.

Features:

Generate all source files

Generate a single RTF file with or without page breaks

Generate a single content (*.CNT) file.

Split the output into several RTF files to easier handle.



Why do you choose Smart HLP 2 RTF?

Printing Help Files: Smart HLP to RTF's greatest strength

As powerful as the WinHelp engine is as a hypertext display engine, it lacks the ability to allow the printing of entire helpfiles. It only allows printing on a topic-by-topic basis. The printed output provides few of the formatting and visual cues you have come to expect from quality documentation. There are no page numbers, indexes, tables of contents or page references in standard WinHelp printouts.
This is especially troublesome for firms who rely on shareware as a distribution method. Most commercial programs include a printed handbook, but a shareware evaluation copy cant. If you're a serious user of a given piece of software, eventually you'll want the same quality of documentation you would get from a store-bought software package.

The trend toward paperless delivery is growing too, leaving more and more publishers with a difficult choice...either include documentation as a separate file and make the shareware or floppy disk archive that much larger, costlier to download or reproduce and more cumbersome to store on your system, or provide a way to make the helpfile, which is usually compiled in a compressed format, serve double duty as both online help and documentation. Most shareware developers choose the latter solution, and so did we.

The trend to paperless software distribution makes Smart HLP to RTF an ideal solution for developers and end users alike. While we developed Smart HLP to RTF to satisfy our users needs, the response was so strong that we chose to offer Smart HLP to RTF to individual users for processing all their helpfiles, and to provide a network edition so that all users on a single domain can easily generate manual-quality printed documentation from a compiled helpfile.

Recompilable Help projects: an added benefit for developers and serious users

While Microsoft no longer supports WinHelp, that hasn't stopped these hypertext platforms from growing faster and becoming more popular with authors and developers with each passing year. HTML Help is replacing the current WinHelp format, but developers and authors still support these platforms.

There is an enormous quantity of data, text, reference, prose and periodical information available, and a great deal more coming. HTML Help is unlikely to replace WinHelp in a big way now. But all this data has little long-term value if you can't do anything but stare at it on your screen. And unfortunately, helpfiles are compiled software, just like programs. They are not editable documents and don't have the flexibility of .DOC and .TXT files. If you want to combine several files into a larger database file, add support for further development tools, recompile a helpfile with support for full-text retrieval, or update and convert the document to HTML, you're stuck. Without the proper tools, you can't even get at the contents of the .HLP.

Smart HLP to RTF provides the lowest cost solution available for this problem. It provides not just the ability to generate more flexible RTF output for printing and document storage, but also allows you to generate a completely recompilable Help project, complete with all text, formatting, jumps, graphics, keywords, secondary windows and more, exactly as the original author intended them to appear.

The RTF file format is a documented file format that uses an industry-standard text tagging syntax (RTF tagging is a little like HTML tagging), so the RTF source documents extracted from helpfiles can be reused and modified in just about any fashion you wish.