Few software products in the last 20 years have really excited me.  When I get excited about a new product, I want to tell others about it.  And that is what I am doing with this article.

 

While I am excited about Dr.Explain, I hope you will find this review biased towards the more practical side of what it takes to create a high-quality HTML Help file.

 

As covered in the Introduction, my discovery of Dr.Explain came from my having a help-file task in front of me, and since it had been so long for me, I factually did not know what was available in terms of help-authoring tools.  While I have in the past been a typesetter and editor among other things, I have almost exclusively been developing software since 1998.  As the years passed, I was aware of the evolutions of HTML Help, but never needed to build a really full-featured HTML Help file until now.

 

The end product needed was the same as for any high-quality commercial product:

 

 

 

1.  a printed User's Guide as well as

2.  a well-organized help file,

 

 

 

Simple, right?  Not necessarily, unless you have the right tools.

 

Since it had been a while since I had created my last HTML Help file, I did a fairly thorough search for what was out there in terms of productivity tools for creating HTML Help files. Of all the products I examined, Dr.Explain stood out as the one that really focused on efficiency and productivity of the overall Help-project production cycle, especially when one is documenting software, which was indeed part of what I was going to be documenting.

 

As I worked with Dr.Explain more and more, I could tell that the people that created Dr.Explain are very good at what they do! I actually enjoyed working with it because of how simple it was to get a lot of work done fast, yet how much flexibility it gave me regarding layout and the appearance of the final documents.