Doc-To-Help 2009 introduces a built-in editor that makes Doc-To-Help an all-inclusive authoring and publishing solution. ComponentOne’s goal is to provide a standards-based authoring experience that does the hard work for you. Here is an overview of how we have developed an environment that you will love to use.

Simply A Great Authoring Tool

The built-in editor, introduced in Doc-To-Help 2009, was designed to give authors an experience that allows them to focus on doing what they do best: write and design the content they need to produce. Highlights include a full-featured WYSIWYG experience, multiple views, and powerful style editing.

Full-Featured Editing

Doc-To-Help’s editor gives you all the tools you need to point, click, write, and develop quality content. Convenient toolbars give you access to typical editor features such as the clipboard, formatting, table editing, image and multimedia management, and hyperlinks.

You also get a toolbar to configure your Help systems and manuals. Topic links, pop-ups , text effects, conditional text, and more.

Easy, Consistent Formatting

Everybody knows that organizing and using a consistent set of styles is key to great presentation. The conundrum is that nobody wants to manage style sheets. Doc-To-help solves this problem by giving you powerful and very easy to use style editing tools. To start, you style list is always available in a collapsible pane.

We also make creating and modifying styles easy with a style editor much like the one found in Microsoft Word.

It’s simple, you edit a style and Doc-To-Help changes the style sheet. When you want to apply a style, just select it.

Multiple Modes

Any good editor gives you multiple modes and views. Doc-To-Help gives you a WYSIWYG design view, a view that shows markup for Help creation, an editable source view, and a preview. So,  most will work mainly in design view and use preview to see what the finished product will be. But, you can use more advanced views such as markup and source. The really cool part is that Doc-To-Help will automatically fix the code if you make any modifications that do not adhere to Web standards.

XML-Based Technology in a Author-Friendly Package

XML is possibly the most popular word in today’s content authoring world. XML provides several great benefits. It allows authors to separate content from presentation. This ensures consistent formatting and makes it very easy to change formatting when necessary. XML also makes content portable and reusable since it is arranged in standard tags.

The problem is that there is a lack of authoring tools that make this technology transparent to a writer who shouldn’t be bothered with the need to know the details of XHTML. That is until now. Doc-To-Help uses XML technology under the hood while providing an editor experience much like what one would experience in Microsoft Word, only easier.

Doc-To-Help is the only tool available that adheres to the W3C strict XHTML specification. This means your content complies to industry standards, will always be compatible with the strictest of environments, is consistently formatted, and can be parsed by third party systems. In fact, the code is so clean, that it can be opened in other editors.

What is great about all this is that the Doc-To-Help user doesn’t even need to know what XML is. We take care of all the technical details for you while you write. But, if you are a tinkerer, you can tweak the code.

Convert Existing Documents

So, you are sold. You want to write in our XML-based editor, but you have a bunch of Word documents. It’s OK, we have a very powerful converter. You just click a button and Doc-To-Help will convert your Word documents (or HTML files) to XML files. We even give you a mapping utility if you want to map your Word style to XML tags.

Note that Doc-To-Help still has the great Word support that made it famous. Word users can continue to work in word if they wish. You can even mix Word documents with content authored directly in Doc-To-Help.

A True, Easy-to-Use Authoring and Publishing Solution

Doc-To-Help is the most complete all-inclusive authoring and publishing solution. An author can author content, configure Help and manual features, and publish many formats with one application. We worked very diligently to ensure that the authoring experience was as easy as Word and easier than any other XML editor on the market. Take a look, you will see for yourself.