Any free alternative to Robohelp?

Question

Any free alternative to Robohelp? Prefer open source

Need some sort of online help authoring tool for an open source project.

Answer 1

I like Sphinx.

You write your documentation using a plain text markup format, reStructuredText.

Sphinx can create HTML, Windows HTML help and PDF (via Latex).

I have created end-user documentation for two projects using Sphinx, and have also used it to document a couple of Python packages (Sphinx has a lot of features around extracting documentation from Python modules, it was originally created to write the Python documentation).

It is very easy to get started, and you get professional-looking documentation with a minimal effort.

If you are used to the WYSIWYG way of text editing, using a plain-text markup format might take some getting used to. But I believe it will be worth the effort.

I also have some experience with DocBook (one of the end-user documentation projects mentioned was a DocBook-to-Sphinx migration). I prefer Sphinx over Docbook: Plain text is more pleasant to work with than XML, Sphinx has a simpler toolchain.

See also:

• List of projects using Sphinx.
• PDF example

Answer 2

Are you trying to make just CHM or other output formats too?

Take a look at DocBook. You can make (from one source file) pdf, html and chm - and some others, too. I've used it in the past but it's not very easy or convenient to use. If you only want to output chm (and need to use a free solution), see if you can get away with using the htmlhelp workshop (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc&displaylang=en).

Answer 3

Check out this list of free help authoring tools, bound to be something useful there.

Answer 4

If you are trying to build .chm based help, try chm-build

Answer 5

Just remembered: depending on what you want to do, you can use doxygen (www.doxygen.org) or the free help tool from http://www.vizacc.com/.