Limited flexibility with DotNet Help - what do you think?

[Mette Nyberg]

I have started the journey to offer dynamic Help to my users. Maybe it will be a very short one.
At first I thought that would be so cool - no need to hit F1, the relevant help topic is right there in front of you.
After some time playing around with the new format I am not so sure anymore. As an author there is very little possiblity to customize the output and in some cases it's double trouble. Take caption for example. You cannot define caption in Flare and if you like me generate 3 output files from the same project this means that I need to make sure that my developer writes the correct caption title in the viewers. Or am I missing something here?
I have also looked for a Hide/Show (TOC pane) button - similar to the one in chm. Can't find it.
Flare's Help tells me that of the few styles I actually CAN edit, toolbar is one of them. Hmm - I fail to see that. I have tried several changes but the only thing I can change is the background color and font styles in TOC pane. Again according to the Help I should be able to specify elements (such as tabs, acccordions) that I want to include. Can't' see that happening.
I would like to get rid of the section Index Results as I don't want to include Index as an accordion, but I can neither delete the display of the Index accordion nor the Index Results.
I feel that by generating dotnet Help I am offering my users an inferior looking Help and I wonder how many of you actually use dotnet Help? To judge from the dates on the entries made for detnetHelp in this Community, it seems as if the interest cooled off about a year ago.

[RamonS]

Aside from the lack of flexibility, the biggest disadvantage is that DotNetHelp requires users to install and maintain a proprietary viewer. As far as I know, that is not needed when embedding help. But embedded help isn't favored by users (although that may vary), because it takes up a good amount of screen space and still only allows for giving short hints rather than in-depth assistance. Maybe that is OK for today's ADD generation.