Moving from CHM to server-installed HTML help

[klbmarsh]

In case you haven't heard, CHMs are very old school. But so is my Dev team. I've been hinting for years, then asking, now begging "Can we please stop using CHM for in-product help?" When they think of HTML, they think "Internet" and many of our customers cannot browse the internet for security reasons. CHM is not as clean and pretty as it used to be, now that we know how much better it looks in HTML.
I've used many products that take the same files I would upload to the website for online help and instead put them in a /help/ folder in the installation directory of their product.
Have any of you switched delivery of your help from CHM to installed HTML5 help?
I know most of the work is on the developer side to redo help hooks and such, but I can't find any references online. When I search "server-installed help" I get too many unrelated hits.
Any assistance you can provide is appreciated!

Take a deep breath and smile to make your brain believe you're having a good day!
Karla

[NorthEast]

Yes, we switched a very long time ago.

We have the help installed in different ways - installed in a local server, and installed to the local file system.
One product already has server and client components, so the server component app installs the help to the local server, and when you use help in the client app it opens the help that's been installed to the local server (URL points to the server).
In another product, the HTML5 is just installed straight to the local file system, so when you use the help in the app it opens the help from the installation folder (URL points to file://). There's not much difference to the server/client scenario, except help installed in the local file system will have some security restrictions that you don't have when running from a server. All the regular help functions work fine though.

If you use Flare to produce the CHM and already use CSH calls with alias values (numbers), then you can use the same alias values in the CSH links to the HTML5 help. CSH links to HTML5 help support both alias identifiers (text) and alias values (numbers), so you can still continue to use the alias values if you want.
See: https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2023/Content/Flare/CSH/Process/CSH-Calls/CSH-Calls-HTML5-Developers.htm
If you didn't previously use CSH calls to the CHM, now might be a good time to start using CSH.

[Ioana_St]

My company's clients also have restricted internet, so we deliver the HTML5 online help as an installable ZIP or MSI. They can just point the application to a file system location or a network share or an internal web server. Another product in my company just bundles the online help inside the application package, so they don't even need to install it separately.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I know what you mean - it took me years to persuade my previous company to swap. As suggested, as long as the help is using CSH IDs rather than hardcoded filenames to link to the help, it should be fairly smooth. And even if they don't, I did a proof of concept to change their app that used hardcoded filenames and paths that worked beautifully. (Unfortunately I left before they fully sucked it up and went for it, which is a shame, because it looked lovely.)

If you can find a tame developer who's willing to lend you an hour or two, I suggest you create a new HTML5 target and generate a help (doesn't have to be anything fancy, just check that it builds without errors and warnings), then ask your tame Dev to copy the whole HTML5 folder from your output folder to wherever it needs to go in the folder structure (possibly the same place the CHM was?) and then link to the Default.htm topic. If that works without too much fiddling around, you can then test a few context-sensitive links to confirm that they also work. (The installer obviously needs to be looking for all those files in the HTML5 folder rather than a single file, so whoever is in charge of the installer might kick up a bit, but it shouldn't be a big deal for them.)

If that basic test works, you can then work on making your HTML5 output look lovely, but get that test done first, just so they can see how easy it can be.