Useful Tools and Links

Site / Tool

Content

I use Batch File Renamer when I need to:

• Add prefixes and suffixes
• Change the case
• Fill blanks with underscores
• etc.

There seems to be a problem from the devoloper's site at Cerebral Synergy but you can still find it at www.snapfiles.com and some other sites. Be careful about other products with the same name. This is the one that in my opinion has much better functionality.

An excellent find and replace tool with many other useful authoring tools built in.

It's also an excellent launch pad to a whole host of useful stuff.

The free version of Vice Versa's excellent tool to compare the contents of a folder and report the differences. Can be set to compare just the file size and date for speed. The CRC method also checks content. Use the "both" for a complete check.

If you have two copies of a project and are not sure what the differences are, or even if there are any differences, this will resolve the problem.

HTML Entity Lookup

Firefox Addin

Two links here.

The first takes you to a webpage where you can enter something like "arrow" in a field and the page will show you all the arrow symbols that can be created using entities, there are more than shown here. You can click the clipboard symbol to add the html code to your clipboard. Great for finding the more obscure entities without scrolling through a list of all of them.

The second link takes you to a Firefox add in that is based on the same code.

Click the install icon and download the XPI file to your PC. Go to the XPI file in Windows Explorer and drag it to a Firefox window and release it to install.

Ignore the Dashboard Widget you see unless you are running an Apple Mac.

As it says on Marc Achtelig's site...

"Do you write technical documentation? Here you can find know-how, tools and links that help you to design and to write clear, concise, user-friendly manuals, online help files, screencasts and other forms of user assistance."

Marc provides a lot of information and lists many of the tools that make life easier. Well worth a look.

Write macros that work with any application.

• Link it to RoboHelp so that you can have shortcuts to change styles in the same way as in Word.
• Hold text that you repeat throughout your help so that you always get it word perfect.
• Insert tables with all the formatting you like.

It's low cost and you will wonder how you survived without it.

Do you want thumbnail images that expand when the user hovers the mouse over them? Maybe you want one click to expand and one click to contract? Try the images below.

	This one will expand over the thumbnail when clicked. Click the image or the optional button to close it. I have set it to just have a close button. If you are setting up an image gallery, you can also have Next and Previous buttons.
	This one will centre on your screen when clicked. Click the image or the optional button to close it. I have set it to just have a close button. If you are setting up an image gallery, you can also have Next and Previous buttons.
	This one will expand when you mouseover the image and contract when you move the mouse away. I have set this image up with no buttons. It's an option with any effect and because moving the mouse away closes the image, I saw no point in having a button here.

The discrete acknowledgement on the image is there because Magic Toolbox have kindly allowed me to use the free home use version. It does not appear if you are using the commercial use product, which is inexpensive.

In Dreamweaver you insert the thumbnail and link it to the full size image, then you add the parameters to get the effect you want, apply a style class and that's it. The required CSS styles can be added to an existing style sheet or you can use the supplied CSS.

In this page I have applied the paramater to each image because I want different effects. If I wanted to have the same effect for all images, I would add the information after the reference to the javascript file.

<script type="text/javascript"
src="yourpath/magicthumb/magicthumb.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
MagicThumb.options = {
'expand-trigger':'mouseover',
'expand-align':'image'
};
</script>

Support has been excellent.

Feature request / Bug report

If you are looking for online training, Rick Stone (RoboWizard) is one of the world's most experienced RoboHelp users and he provides training through one of his sites.

www.showmesolutions.biz

I have been using Top Style for years and it is now in Version 4. There is a trial version.

Version 3 had a free Lite version where the only restriction was that you could only edit one CSS at a time. If you wanted to lift CSS from another CSS, you opened that in Notepad and copied it into Top Style where you had all its aids. The Lite version is no longer available from Top Style but I found a link here.

Try Microsoft's Visual Web Developer if you need a free HTML editor. Naturally there are some Microsoft centric features but it is a good editor and, like I said, it's free.

An excellent source of "how to" for html, css and so on. As well as the tutorials for newbies, it has some excellent reference topics for the old stagers. A 'must visit' site. Also see HTML Code Tutorials above.

An excellent freeware link checker. If you have merged webhelp, RoboHelp does not report broken links across projects so you need a utility to do this. Dreamweaver and FrontPage have such functions but see how quick this one is.

Thanks to Roger Nilsson of Copperfield Publishing for this link.