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Is there a free software for creating windows help files for your program?
I would like something that allows an output of both CHM and HTML files.
Yes. HelpMaker from sourceforge (The original site www.vizacc.com is down). Best free help utility ever.
HTML Help Workshop by Microsoft.
If you're developing for .NET and you're looking to generate XML documentation help files you should look into Microsoft's shared-source Sandcastle project, and the front-end GUI for it "Sandcastle Help File Builder."
It's pretty nice and highly configurable. You can make some really good help documentation using it.
It was a little slow the last time I used it (over 6 months ago) but it may have been optimized since then...
I'm not sure about 'free', but Dr. Explain is a little over $100 and worth every penny. We use it to produce both help for desktop apps with a single CHM and web apps using the HTML export. The best part is that it 'auto-magically' mines your webpage or app page and starts the basic construction of the help for you. The ROI for us was about 1 day.
HelpNDoc is free for personal use. It can generate CHM and HTML help files as requested, as well as Word DocX, PDF, ePub and Kindle eBooks from the same source.
DocBook is a universal standard file format for writing software documentation.
DocBook is an XML file format and as such is already blessed by Microsoft. It is declarative, earning it further kudos.
DocBook allows you to identify to it what pictures are screenshots, what strings of words are actually commands, and so forth. Which yes, actually means it is a bonafide part of the semantic web.
Because of this, you can use an XPath expression to search for all the screenshots, all the commands, and so forth. Decent IDE's all support XPath searches, and so do lots of small, free utilities.
Once you have worked out which XPath search string returns the content you want, you can write a little XSLT stylesheet yourself or with someone else's help. The stylesheet can collect the information and generate an HTML bullet-list (UL LI), a definitions list (DL DT,DD), or a quick reference card. Whatever you like. XPath, XSLT, and the various *ML languages are very flexible.
Read From DocBook to Integrated Help Systems for information about how to automatically convert a DocBook standard file into a proprietary and very practical Microsoft Windows HTML Help file.
For more information about DocBook itself go visit http://www.docbook.org/ - and grab the free XSLT stylesheets for the latest version while you are there.
DocBook files can be automatically converted into many file formats besides the one used in Microsoft Windows WinHelp files. See the docbook.org web site for details. It is a long list of supported file formats, so brace yourself for a pleasant surprise!
If you already have a structured XML text editor, you might want to use that. If you are writing a really big online help file then consider oXygenXML and/or Open Office Writer. The former is a commercial product and the latter is free, open source software.
For more information about using Open Office Writer to create/edit DocBook files, read Getting Started with DocBook on Open Office.
Doxygen, while originally meant to produce code documentation can be made quite easily to produce any kind of help.
It's not "free" but the best software I've ever come across is HelpScribble from Just Great Software. I use it on Windows 7 without any problem. What I like most is its ability to integrate SHG files into the helpfile. A picture is worth a thousand words so I tend to use screen images where I capture buttons, text boxes or whatever. The user can see that screen and then just click of the display they want more information on an "BOOM!" ... the explanation pops right up! There's no need to thumb through pages of a manual or screens.
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My internet connection is extremely slow and therefore I execute batch files on the server without GUI, i.e. directly from the terminal. However, oftentimes I need to make a few changes in the code and a text editor highlighting Stata syntax would not hurt. Is there one?
Sublime Text editor has a package for Stata. If you're using mac you can find installation instructions here.
As linked by Maarten Buis, Nick Cox's list is the reference. It's a cool list, but it's badly outdated and therefore misses out the best parts of Stata support on Mac OS X. Here are some additions that also allude to the other answers.
Mac
TextMate has two Stata bundles, the Beatty bundle and the more recent Schumm bundle that uses a smarter approach to Stata syntax. (Note: not sure whether the Beatty bundle works under Stata 13; the Schumm bundle, which is the one you get through TextMate's bundle settings, does.)
Two other editors, Chocolat and Sublime Text, support TextMate bundles or ports of TextMate bundles. Phil Schumm's Stata bundle for TextMate is the most advanced and up-to-date solution that I know of, so I'd recommend that if you need an external editor.
TextWrangler also supports Stata through its own plugin system. I guess that BBEdit might therefore support it too, probably through slightly more awkward AppleScript calls. The only reason I see to use these instead of TextMate is if you are running an old system and/or are using these editors already.
If you need more alternatives, check out websites like Alternative To, I Use This, MacUpdate or VersionTracker for a larger choice of options. You'll find out that SubEthaEdit and Smultron (and probably its deceased fork, Fraise) support Stata, for instance.
tl;dr On Mac OS X, use TextMate with the Schumm bundle, and you will like it. (No idea if you can create GitHub issues through email, though!)
Win
Notepad++ has support, and there are mentions on Statalist of PFE, UltraEdit and WinEdt also having support. My guess is that you will find it more useful to get Sublime Text and use its Stata bundle port, unless again you are already using these editors.
tl;dr On both Mac OS X and Windows, Sublime Text with the Stata TextMate bundle port seem to work well.
As mentioned in another answer, Vim also offers support, and Emacs has an ado major mode, plus some additional functions through ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics). Finally, if you are looking a Java cross-platform solution (but why would you?), jEdit supports Stata syntax.
If you want support for Stata colored syntax everywhere (e.g. on GitHub), you'll need to write a lexer for Stata and submit it to Pygments. I've asked a question about that. It does not look very difficult if you know enough Python (which I do not and regret).
HTH
Added: links, sections.
Unsurprisingly, Vim supports syntax highlighting for Stata out of the box. See http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=440 and this blog post:
http://www.enoriver.net/stata/2010/02/26/i-switched-to-vim/
Similar to the other folks, my recommendations are Sublime Text and TextMate. They're my favorite editors on Windows and Mac, respectively. If you're a Mac user, I recommend TextMate (It's free, but Sublime Text is not).
You asked for a text editor, but if you also use any HTML editor, you can use Statax useful. (Here is the link to Statax, if it interests you).
This question was asked years ago, but I would like to add another option that is probably already known to more experienced Stata users. However, this may not be the case for new programmers who end up here, perhaps through a search engine, looking to find more information on the topic.
Visual Studio Code is a streamlined code editor, which offers a very flexible environment for programming. Once installed, one can obtain the necessary add-on package for Stata syntax highlighting from the Visual Studio Marketplace. It is regularly updated and the user can expand its functionality using extensions. As such, if someone is programming in more than one language, s/he can keep everything under one roof.
This solution addresses the OP's need to edit files remotely through its built-in Git support. Git is now pretty much the standard in version control. The idea behind it is that one does the work locally and then syncs the copy of the repository with the copy on the server.
Although this is not a command-line solution, i think it provides a great cross-platform development environment. And Git itself has proven to be very fast and reliable.
I'm looking for some tools that could be used by human translators during the process of translating our GWT application into other languages.
Currently, we have the English version of .properties files containing constants and messages, and need create the files for other languages. This tool should be easy to use, so even non-IT-lover can master it.
Or, do you suggest other method for translation of the texts?
I heard the "community" approach becomes quite popular, by that I mean that one uploads his texts to some (?) forum, and the community there creates the translations into other language - but as I said, I don't know much about this
Are there any online platforms for this purpose?
any other ideas?
See my SO answer for VB 6 source code, speech text is in french want to translate to english. The same answer works if you replace the computer langauge "VB6" by "JavaScript".
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The people writing the user manual are not necessarily programmers, and they need a visual editor. A major issue is the internal format of the authoring tool; it should be readable text/html, so it's easy to compare versions of individual pages checked into version control.
DocBook
(source: docbook.org)
Microsoft HTML Help Workshop can be used to create good quality professional CHM help files. All you need is a bunch of HTML files. The tool "compiles" all these and bundles into a single Help file.
The HTML files can be generated using Microsoft Word/Frontpage or even Dreamweaver. You might want to consider source controlling these HTML files.
Latex. Lyx provides WYSIWYM for writing latex files.
At my old job they used a tool by madcap software called flare.
It seemed to work really well.
There are other professional products which allow help file writing and they have support of "context ID" which makes context sensitive help possible. Doc To Help and RoboHelp are these type of products.
A good combination to consider is Subversion, DocBook and Publican.
Version control = Subversion
Content Authoring = DocBook
Publishing = Publican
Optional WYSIWYG = Serna
At the moment, this is one of the toolchains in use by the world's largest provider of open source solutions, and the name behind much of the world's use of Linux-based operation systems in the enterprise market. Most (and close to all) of Red Hat's official documentation is created in such a manner. Same goes for Fedora.
The major "pro" here is that these are freely available tools, with a strong overlap in the market of technical writers. All of which will be able to (but might not want to) write in XML, and picking up DocBook is like picking up HTML in the 90's. Subversion is a very common version control tool, that like DocBook is relatively easy to implement and use. Publican is a great publishing tool that can take DocBook XML, and publish it to PDF, HTML, HTML-single, etc. Obviously your writers can use a WYSIWYG like Serna, but I use snippets in Geany (on Fedora) or TextMate (on OS X) personally.
The major "con" is the perception of technicality. Your writers might want WYSIWYG (and can have it), and depending on your documentation needs, this might be what you end up using. As you would know, there's a market out there for "Technical Writers" who specialize in fixing Microsoft Word styles (and markup), so the arguments for separating "authoring" from "publishing" are based on proven but distinct use cases for organizations that require documentation to be held up to the same standards of the engineering/programming/source production.
Some of the extreme advice you will get comes from people and companies that have been exposed to the value of XML documentation, and especially those in the realms of DITA, where certain multi-nationals have a reputation for acquisitions that are influenced by the format and availability of the product knowledge. there are also the arguments that locking your documentation into a "sticky" or closed format doesn't help the future maintenance requirements. This is where the open source options gain support on a corporate level. Plus, obviously, it's free.
You can use Subversion and MGTEK Help Producer. Help Producer makes help files from Word documents. TortoiseSVN comes with scripts to compare different revisions of Word documents, in Word itself (Word has a version compare tool).
Your users are going to want a visual diff tool that resembles the one they are editing in. If they are just slightly not-technical, DocBook or Latex aren't going to work (I've tried giving my users both, and I even tried Epic Editor as a DocBook editor which is very expensive but didn't work out very well after all). Sticking to something they know (Word) will prevent you many headaches.
I was very reluctant to go this route at first too, because I wanted a solution that was more 'technically perfect', but I realized over time that having happy and productive users was more important. Just saying that I know where you're coming from, but try the Word route - it works much better in practice than all the 'pure' text-based solutions that are out there. Regular users don't like markup based editing.
If you're using Visual Studio, take a look at SandCastle - http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle.
There's also a couple of tools that help you build sandcastle files, try searching "sandcastle" on codeplex. One of them is SandCastle Help File Builder (http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB), but I've never used it so I don't know if non-technical users will be happy with that.
Mapcap Flare is the best commercial tool around. Written by the ex-developers of Robodoc
I created a documentation system called Mandown (Markdown/Html/Javascript/file-based relatively linked documents for portability) which would easily go under version control. The visual editor part you would have to figure out separately - I sometimes use HTML-Kit which at least has a preview feature.
See What is the best way to store software documentation?
Here's another tool to check out: Xilize
We are using APT. It integrates well with the CI (standard build artifact) and is more alive than for instance word document. It is also possible to generate PDFs and other formats when needed.
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As a developer I really don't like writing documentation but when I have to I'd like to make the process as painless as possible.
The problem with Word is that it constantly gets in my way. I worry more about the layout than about the actual content ... that's why I'd like to get rid of Word.
Ideally I'd like to write my content and then 'compile' it into a document.
I've heard of LaTeX but I don't have any experience with it whatsoever. Would this be the right technology for the job? What editor (Windows) should I use? Is it a good idea to start with LyX?
EDIT: I'm not asking about documenting code (I use Sandcastle for that).
Update 2014:
We have now switched to GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown).
It's really easy to work with.
Write code & documentation in the same IDE!
Everything can be versioned!
Get great output either as raw txt, html or pdf!
My solution to this was to invest some time in creating a decent Word Template for myself.
The important thing to do is make sure you have a Style defined for everything you can put in the document.
Once you have all the Styles defined and all of the document content tagged with the correct Style instead of formatted in an ad hoc fashion, you'll be surprised how easy it is to produce good looking Word documents quickly every time.
The wider problem here is that everyone spends hours in Word and yet it is very rare for companies to invest in Word training. At some point you have to bite the bullet and take the time to teach yourself how to use it properly, just like you would with any other tool.
Anything you can do with LyX you can do with LaTeX. LaTeX is suitable for all sorts of things; it has been used for everything from manuals to lecture slides to novels.
I think LaTeX is probably worth looking into as an option; if you've ever wanted to "code" for your word processor, LaTeX is for you. At the simplest level you can define new commands to do things for you, but there's a lot of power there. And the output looks really neat.
In my opinion, LyX is fantastic in certain circumstances, handy in others, and occasionally just gets in your way. I think it should be seen as a productivity booster for LaTeX. In other words, learn to use LaTeX before trying LyX. Both are of course free and available for Windows, though the learning curve is quite steep compared with MS Word. For long documents, or plenty of similar documents, LaTeX/LyX is probably a worthwhile investment.
I've found that wikis can be good for this. Find a wiki you like that lets you do a bit of formatting, but nothing really heavy. Ideally it should let you format code easily too - to be honest, the markdown available on SO is probably a good start.
That way:
You have change tracking built-in (assuming a decent wiki)
You can edit from anywhere
Everyone always sees the same documentation (instant distribution)
You can concentrate on content instead of formatting
You could write your documentation using your own XML format and then transform it into any format with XSL (e.g. PDF via FOP+XSL-FO ).
See also the DocBook XML format.
LaTeX is an extremely powerful tool and might well be overkill here as it is designed for scientific/mathematical literature. It has a (relatively) steep learning curve and can be tricky to coax to do exactly as you want if you're new to it. I LOVE LaTeX, but it is not really a general purpose word processor.
Have you considered OpenOffice instead?
LaTeX is really a very powerful language if you need to write documents.
Perhaps you can try texmaker, a cross-platform LaTeX editor:
Texmaker is a clean, highly
configurable LaTeX editor with good
hot key support and extensive Latex
documentation. Texmaker integrates
many tools needed to develop
documents with LaTeX, in just one
application. It has some nice
features such as syntax highlighting,
insertion of 370 mathematical symbols
with only one click, and "structure
view" of the document for easier
navigation.
What about using HTML? This way you could then publish the documentation if there will be need for many people to access it from many places.
Despite all efforts and reasonable expectation I don't think Word Processing has been "solved" yet.
My response to what I also personally find a deeply frustrating experience with MS Word is to avoid it altogether and use an auto-documenting tool like GhostDoc to generate XML from what I've already written in the code (DRY!) and deal with the XML from an XSLT based intranet site or similar later.
Are you talking about documenting your actual code? If so, I recommend Doxygen for unmanaged code and Sandcastle for managed code. Both will compile your help or build it as a website for you.
Both applications will read special tags above functions / classes / variables and compile that into the help.
Well I've never found anything wrong with MS-Word in the first place. (i.e if you take the time to know how to use it effectively). OpenOffice indeed is an amazing & credible free alternative - but then if you hate MS Word for layout related problems, the same problem is gonna occur with OpenOffice too.
Never tried the Latex system myself, but have heard its good for scientific work. I think using some HTML WYSIWYG editor would be best for you, if you want to just focus on the content.
I considered a wiki, but I decided to go with a modified Markdown notation, for the simple reason, that a wiki's content isn't easily exported and distributed outside of the wiki itself, while the Markdown can be rendered into HTML.
Answer to chris' question about my workflow: I write the documentation with a Notepad-like application (TextWrangler, only because of its word-wrapping feature) in its raw Markdown format. Then I have a small localhost documentation website with my modified Markdown parser (extended for a few features and a bit more HTML-oriented functionality) that checks for the timestamps for the documentation files - if a file has been updated, it parses that file into HTML, and stores the file in a cache.
This way I'm able to edit the source documentation on my desktop, and just press F5 in my browser to see the results immediately.
I haven't got around to trying it yet, but I've always thought AsciiDoc would be good for this kind of thing.
If you want something simpler than LaTeX, you can have a look at ReStructured Text
Read this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pragmatic_Programmer . There is some idee fixe inside, so that documentation should be built automatically. Think about using your IDE for this, or look for some additional tools. Most modern languages support generating documentation as you write the code. This can simply maintain your doc in touch with latest changes in the code.
I prefer to use a RTF editor which is a lot less clunkier than words. This way the formatting and all the headers/footers nonsense will not take up half your time. Wordpad has worked for me on several occasions. I'm stuck with Word for now though :(
there are a lot of possible ways:
embedded documentation, e.g. javadoc: good for describing APIs, not so good for the "big picture"
plain html: can be checked in under version control, a definite plus
a wiki, e.g. confluence -- great for collaboration, but has version control different from your source
LaTeX or somesuch: better suited for books or papers than typical documentation; support for graphics is cumbersome
an Office clone, e.g. OpenOffice: mostly the same as Word+Visio, but open source, with a nicer document format
I usually document the software structure (the "metaphors" of a project, component interrelations, external systems) up front, using Visio, in "freeform" UML. These are then embedded in confluence, which can be converted to PDF if someone wants a printout.
LyX
LyX is a WYSIWYM front end to LaTeX: You get the convenience of a document processor (somewhat similar to Word) with the consistency and power of LaTeX: It doesn't get in your way and can do a lot of things that professional writers need.
Note: The correct answer for you really depends on your way of thinking --- we can't decide this for you. This answer simply shows an excellent choice if you think of documentations as documents and want something similar to Word (where Word is good) that doesn't suck as Word (where Word is bad for programmers).
But many programmers think of documentation differently and hence prefer different metaphors. I myself had the same problem years ago, worked with LaTeX (as I am a mathematician), found LyX and finally settled on a Wiki/Source system that I wrote myself.
Vim is the solution for anything that means writing plain text in the most efficient possible way. If you need formatting, then use XML, Latex or something similar (in Vim).
Vim changed my life!
Simple answer: LaTeX sounds like just what you are looking for.
I use it for writing documentation myself. I will never go back to Word if I have the option.
At phc, we started with latex, then moved to docbook, and have settled (permanently I hope) on Restructured Text/Sphinx.
Latex was chosen because we are academics, and latex is the tool of choice. I believe it didn't generate good enough HTML.
Docbook was chosen for power, but it was very unwieldy. It put us off writing any documentation: code had to be manually formatted, we kept forgetting the syntax, and it was difficult to read. The learning curve was also steep.
Finally, we moved to reST, using sphinx, and that was a great decision. Documentation is now very easy to write, and both PDF and HTML versions look beautiful (though the PDF could do with some customization). Its very easy to customize too.
The best bit about reST though, is that its human readable in source form. That is a wonderful advantage. I've switched to using reST for all my stuff now, especially anything over the web (except of course academic papers, where one would be foolish to use anything but latex).
You may want to look into doxygen at http://www.doxygen.nl/, see their nice examples. In this case, the documentation is presented by tags in comments in the source.
Another option would be to use an online system like trac from http://trac.edgewall.org/ which is a wiki/doc/issuetracking system that lives on top of subversion.
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I am looking for a program to make mockup screenshots with. I first found out I could do it with Visual Basic (uglier names I have yet to hear a programming language being called) from joelonsoftware.com. I don't want to start learning VB now, especially since I am still in the process of learning Java. I then found mockupscreens.com, with the searchstring "how to make mockup screenshots". But seeing as I am going to use this program quite infrequently, I don't think paying $80 for it is worth it.
The mockups I'd like to do would be mainly for Windows XP (perhaps also for GNOME, KDE and Mac OSX, but these are not top-priority).
Edit: Balsamiq is suggested, but this is also a non-free program.
Balsamiq
Visio works well, if you have it.
Personally, I like paper and a pen. Then I can't get bogged down in the LOOK of it, and go more for the usability and function. Same with websites.
Once you have the form infront of a customer, you have zero room to move - it you dont deliver it pixel-perfect, they get..... angry. :)
You don't have to learn the language to use the visual forms designer from Visual Studio to create mockups. Furthermore, the Express Edition of Visual Studio is freely available in several languages, namely VB, C# and C++. Take your pick. All ship with the same forms designer that generates backend code in one of the languages. But if you only need the designer, the code might not be relevant for you.
Microsoft Visio used to come with a template containing common Windows UI elements for this purpose. I don't know if it still does.
Jeff Attwood posted about this on CodingHorror - where he mentions Powerpoint prototyping
pen and paper, or if possible, whiteboard. Once you have something you personally think could work I'd go for as rough a computerized model as you can so you don't spend time agreeing font size before the workflow etc is done. The tool I have used here is my visual designer of Visual Studio (it doesn't look too good with screenshots, only good enough to convey what you'd like to build).
Pencil (runs within firefox)
As suggested, C# Express would be well for this, as like VB, it has a GUI designer, but it is also syntactically similar to Java, so - given what you are trying to learn and do with this, it might be a nice fit.
There is a pretty exhaustive list here:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiPrototypingTools
Important point is whether the tool has "black&white" (or "hand-drawn") skin for your mockups, as already commented by others. Many of the tools (including my own, MockupScreens) do.
wxGlade would work as well, plus it's free software.
http://balsamiq.com/ was already mentioned, but I want to explain why I like it.
It will allow you to sketch up a screenshot, and it still looks like a pen and paper version, or a whiteboard discussion.
If you get to detailed on your screenshot, then the customer thinks you are "done" and does not understand whats taking you so long to finish the project. So this "sketchyness" serves as another layer of abstraction.
MockupUI is another one, but its mockups don't look like hand-drawn. They look like the real thing and with real data. It lets you draw wireframes as well as native widgets inheriting their appearance from your OS configuration (aka Windows visual style).
About high-fidelity mockups: The risk that a customer thinks that it's "already done" is minimal as long as you do your mockups during the design specification phase of your project (that's before starting to code). On the contrary, a sketch may be too abstract for the customer to digest, unless he is a software designer too. Sketches are for developers not customers.
Wireframes (or sketches) and mockups are not the same thing and they have different uses. One is to explain functionality, the other is a representation of what the product will look like. Check out Yisela's post about the difference between wireframes and mockups.
Your question was about mockup screenshot software, but you ended-up buying a pretty powerful wireframing software.