HelpStudio is the fastest, easiest way to Create Help Files, publish and integrate them with your desktop or web based applications or components.
Generate help output in cross-platform plain HTML, HTML Help, Help 2.x or printable PDF.
Built in localization support means that you can take your Help File to a global audience if required.
HelpStudio is the Help Authoring Tool trusted by individuals and corporations worldwide since 2003
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Author and Collaborate
HelpStudio seamlessly combines a feature packed WYSIWYG authoring environment, Html based layout templates and customizable Content Widgets to make it simple to create and localize consistent, professional looking help systems with the minimum of effort. No dependencies on Word or other editors and integrates with Source Control for Team Working and Collaboration.
Lightbox Rich Content Authoring Environment
HelpStudio provides you with all the tools you need to author, build and publish great documentation, help or procedures with minimum friction.
Lightbox Topic Editor
The Topic Editor provides powerful authoring functionality including a page map, table editing (row, column or cell cut/copy/paste, resize), unlimited undo, hyperlink designer, build flag highlighting. The Xhtml source editor includes intellisense and tag completion.
Lightbox Link Designer
Creating links in the content that you author improves the usability of your help by providing quick and easy access to related content. In HelpStudio you can create links between your content using standard hyperlinks, or See Also links that are grouped at the end of a given page.
Lightbox Widgets
Delivering great help content often requires a trade off between the time invested in creating dynamic content and the benefits it brings to the users of the content. You no longer need to comprimise - Widgets allow you to deliver dynamic content (e.g. drop down sections, enlarge in place images, colorized example code) without requiring any manual authoring effort and with no need to have HTML or Javascript knowledge. Simply drop a pre-defined Widget in your content and /HelpStudio will take care of the rest.
Lightbox CSS Standards Based Styles Support
/Model.ProductCaption includes a variety of functionality for the creation, management and application of styles. Built around powerful web standard CSS, you can apply existing styles using the Style Picker, define new style rules or inline styles using the Style Editor and edit your Stylesheets in the built in Stylesheet editor.
Lightbox Full Unicode Support
HelpStudio supports Unicode throughout, including Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Unicode support is not a high priced add-on, it is a fundamental feature of the core product.
Why Choose HelpStudio?
- Import your existing content from Html Help 1.x projects, word documents, RoboHelp projects or plain html files;
- Create multiple outputs to Html Help 1.x CHM file, Pdf, Help 2.x or browser help from a single source. Use Build Flags to mark content for inclusion or exclusion in a particular output.
- Industry leading WYSIWYG editor including a rich set of functionality for authoring and maintaining your core content;
- Template based topic editing makes it easy to adapt the style of your content over time without having to rework the actual content;
- Capture screenshots and annotate them with the included Screen Capture and Image Markup tools;
- Multiple members of your team can create Help Files using HelpStudio at the same time through integration with standard Source Control systems.
Demonstration Movies
These short movies provide a great way to discover what can be achieved using HelpStudio.
Introducing HelpStudio
This video provides an introduction to HelpStudio; creating topics, capturing a screenshot, conditionalizing content, creating Pdf booklets. (10 mins)
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Publishing to a web site, ftp server or network location
This movie demonstrates the new Publishing functionality introduced in 2015.1. Publishing makes it easy to publish output generated by Document! X or HelpStudio to a web server or network location. A range of publishing methods are supported; you can publish to an Azure web site, a web site running on IIS, a web site that supports uploading via ftp, or directly to a local network path. (11 mins)
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Introduction to Source Control
This video provides a demonstration on how to enable Source Control functionality, add a project to Source Control and access Source Control features in a Source Control enabled project. (6 mins)
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Automatic optimization for Tablet and Mobile devices
This video demonstrates how the Responsive Output feature allows you to generate content that automatically adapts to the device type of the browser, providing an optimal experience for Mobile, Tablet and Desktop users from a single output. (5 mins)
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Introduction to Localization features
This video will demonstrate how to use the localization features by enabling localization and creating both an English and Japanese output from the Document! X .NET sample project (9 mins).
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Using Build Profiles to create multiple outputs
This short video provides a demonstration of how you can configure a project to create multiple outputs from a single source, with each output driven by a separate options defined in the Build Profile. (3 minutes)
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Comprehensive Project Tools
In addition to the core authoring functionality, HelpStudio includes a suite of project tools that enable you to ensure the quality of your final CHM file:
- Validate all of the links in your help system using the Project Link Checker;
- Check spelling throughout the project using the built in spell checker, which comes complete several european dictionaries;
- Find and Replace throughout all of your content using the integrated Project Find and Replace;
- Check your project for accessibility and standards compliance using the provided Project Analyzer.
Output to Compiled, Web, Tablet, Mobile and PDF
Output to 

Cross Platform Web Help (automatically responsive for
Tablet and Mobile),
Html Help (CHM),
Help 2.x (Visual Studio 2002-2008),
Microsoft Help Viewer (Visual Studio 2010 - 2019) and
PDF from a single source and automatically publish to a web site, ftp server or network location.
Easily integrate the generated output with one of several popular Community Comment services.
Lightbox Cross Platform Browser Help
Browser Help output is viewable directly in the web browser, so is the ideal format for publishing documentation on a web site or intranet site. The browser help output includes a Table of Contents, Index and Full Text Search.
Lightbox Html Help 1.x (CHM)
Html Help 1.x (CHM) is the Microsoft Windows compiled help file format. When building to CHM, the output is a single file that can be deployed to, and viewed on, any machine with Windows installed. The CHM viewer includes a Table of Contents, Index and Full Text Search.
Lightbox PDF Booklet
Generate PDF booklets from the whole project content or a sub-section of Topics. The generated booklet can include a Table of Contents and Index. PDF Booklet output leverages the same HTML based templates as web output so is easy to customize and extend to your own requirements.
Lightbox Tablet and Mobile Support
The automatically generated responsive support allows you to generate a single output that automatically adapts to the device profile; delivering an optimal browsing experience for Desktop, Tablet and Mobile from a single output. Tablet and Mobile devices benefit from buttonized links, a button based fly out Table of Contents and other automatic features that dramatically improve the end user experience.
Lightbox Community Features
The generated output can be automatically integrated with a range of Community Providers (Facebook, Disqus, Livefyre or SolidOpinion) allowing you to include rich community features in your help systems.
Lightbox Help 2.x (Visual Studio 2002-2008)
Help 2.x is a compiled help format used by Visual Studio 2002-2008. You would choose this format if you need to integrate your generated documentation with these Visual Studio versions. The Help 2.x viewer includes a Table of Contents, Index and Full Text Search.
Lightbox Microsoft Help Viewer
Microsoft Help Viewer is the help technology used by Visual Studio 2010-2015. Building Microsoft Help Viewer output and integrating your documentation with Microsoft Help Viewer ensures that help for the assemblies you document is only ever an F1 key press away to Visual Studio users.
Lightbox Publish to network path, ftp, Azure and IIS
Your built documentation can be automatically published to a range of locations; a network path, ftp server, Azure web site or IIS (Internet Information Services) Server. Publishing recongizes which files have changed in the last build, so publishing is quick and minimizes network traffic.
Localization Ready for a Global Market
When your application goes global you want your Help File to be ready. In HelpStudio you can work with multiple locales within a single project, avoiding the traditional "localization drift" problem when trying to maintain multiple translations of the same CHM file.
HelpStudio includes a set of features designed to help you effectively localize your content:
- Create any number of locales for your project but only define the Table of Contents, Topic, Glossary structures once - avoiding "localization drift";
- Use the Xml Import Export wizard to extract only localizable content to a format optimized for use by translation companies;
- Standard terminology in the HelpStudio Templates comes pre-translated to several languages;
- The Localization Report allows to accurately track which content requires translation by recording timestamps each time content is edited or translated;
- Configure different spelling dictionaries for each Locale that you work with.
Content Widgets: A unique way to author complex content
One challenge that anyone will face when attempting to create CHM files is providing the kind of rich content features that users of modern help systems expect, whilst not requiring a large investment of time and effort in creating and maintaining such content. HelpStudio is unique in making it genuinely quick and easy to include (and adapt over time) rich content features by providing a customizable and extendable set of re-usable Content Widgets.
Imagine that you wanted to include a drop down section in your content (a drop down section consists of a header and initially hidden associated content which is shown / hidden when the header is clicked). In a traditional authoring tool you would need to include a complex mix of Html and Javascript in order to provide this kind of dynamic feature. In HelpStudio, simply insert a Drop Down Section widget, edit the header and drop down content as you wish. HelpStudio ships with a set of standard Widgets that can be customized and extended as you wish.
What HelpStudio Customers Say
"Managing documentation as part of developing software can be a surprisingly complex process. With HelpStudio we were able to create and maintain high-quality up-to-date documentation in a short amount of time and with very little overhead.
The flexibility of the HelpStudio made it easy to manage even complex tasks including localization and inclusion of "live" code snippets."
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
Group Program Manager, Microsoft
"We have been using HelpStudio since it first became available.
HelpStudio provides a nice blend of built-in functionality with full customizability, flexibility, and excellent support.
HelpStudio allows us to painlessly combine our API documentation with our User Guide documentation into one file that is easily integrated with our COM and Visual Studio products."
Issam Elbaytam,
VP of Technical Marketing, Data Dynamics
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