In the dark, cold age of pre-internet dawn computer software usually came with the two pinnacles of boomer technology: A manual and possibly a help file.
”Online help” would most likely have been confused with some kind of laundry drying service, so those two things really were the only options to learn about whatever newfangled software you received.
With the advent of Microsoft Windows, there was WinHelp, using a propriety format (.HLP) comprised of RTF files and a table of contents neatly packaged in a file.
Believe it or not, you could use WinHelp files until Windows XP. You could download a WinHelp Viewer until Windows 10 though.
In 1996 or so, with the advent of “online” stuff, everything had to move to HTML. So did Microsoft Help. There was a ‘compiled’ HTML help file format (.CHM) that was comprised of HTML files and associated images packaged in a proprietary format. There were different iterations of authoring tools and viewers, which all seem to have gone the way of the Dodo.
Nobody has said so, but I have a strong suspicion that since it involved an Internet Explorer control capable of running scripts, it eventually fell prey to an exploit here and there, so it went away.
If you ask anybody, the answer usually is “Why don’t you just put your help online?”
That is great, but not everyone wants to keep a web server running just for online help and if you develop applications for air-gapped environments, that is not a choice anyway.
A user recently asked what we would recommend to use for help. I did some googling and quickly came up with … nothing. Well, nothing worth mentioning that is.
So I rolled up my sleeves and figured it would be easy enough to come up with something simple that fits the bill.
The help viewer is quite simple. A single exe (SAPIENHlp.exe) that takes a few parameters to show what topic you want.
– c Determines the color scheme. By default, the help viewer uses the Windows setting, light or dark.
– c 0 forces dark mode, –c 1 forces light mode.
– f Specifies the name of the RTF file to show. If you are using plain RTF files, you can use just the file name if the file resides in the same folder as SAPIENHlp.exe.
If you package your RTF files as a .shlp file, again, only the file name is needed.
Otherwise, the full path name is required.
-h Specifies the help file name. If this parameter is omitted, the viewer looks for a file named HelpFile.shlp and locates the RTF file specified with –f in this help file.
In other words, unless you rename your help file or it is in some other place than the help viewer, you do not need that parameter.
Speaking of help file, this is not yet another proprietary format. It is simply a zip file with another extension. You can therefore be sure that you can always recover your RTF files from the help file itself.
So from a PowerShell script or application, you would use
start-process –filepath “./Help/SAPIENHlp.exe” –f “This is a Help Topic.rtf”or, to use all parameters:
start-process –filepath “./Help/SAPIENHlp.exe” –c 0 –f “This is a Help Topic.rtf” –h MyApp.shlpYou do not need to keep track of the process. Anything that makes the help viewer lose focus will exit the process. Including launching another help.
Microsoft threw me a little curveball here. Originally I was going to just recommend using WordPad to create your RTF files. But with Windows 24H2, WordPad is no more.
So I spent some extra time creating the SAPIEN Help Author application. A high-flying name for an MDI version of WordPad with a File Browser panel.
This is a beta, expiring June 30th, 2025, and can be downloaded here: SAPIENHelp.zip
There are plenty of additional features and improvements that can be made: table of contents, text search, index, viewer size parameters, a viewer with a table of contents and additional UI, etc.
But I don’t want to spend much time on that if there are no takers. So please leave a comment or post in our forum: https://www.sapien.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=31
Any feedback is appreciated.
How does relate to the Sapien PowerShell HelpWriter product?
In your extensive search, did you come across Adobe RoboHelp?
This has no relation to PowerShell HelpWriter, which is specifically designed to author help content for PowerShell modules.
I did come across Adobe Robohelp. I could not find any information if it can create content for offline use, it uses HTML, which makes it an attack vector and the software itself seems to be not available for offline use.
So it is disqualified for the intended use of displaying simple context help for PowerShell Forms applications.
That is aside from the not insignificant cost, which seems a bit steep for the intended purpose here. (Disclaimer: I am sure RoboHelp is worth every penny for what it was meant to be used for)