Since we are not familiar with IdeaInformaer, the ideas display is delayed until the end of the promotion. These good ideas should have received more votes. We apologize for that. Thanks for your support. Thanks to GOTD and IdeaInformer. SANWHOLE

on more thing I would like to conway to you @CS Locke

If you are, which I do not know, nor my concern,
in any way affiliated with a company from Colchester,UK then pls read up on state of the art help documentation.
Hilarious or sad as it may be, but XP is out of support and has been out of Microsoft support for some time. Even beloved Win 7s extended support will end in 2020 and according to my jungle-drum informers MS will enforce measures to win over ardent lovers from going online through that OS system. MS, seemingly have no intention of repeating the XP from success to debacle story.

The number of Windows apps responding to calling up F1 for help get fewer and fewer, to large degree due to the fact that software companies like to sell or see their stuff made known across the OS border. What is more, being kind of clever rats, they now how people prefer to work and being rightly concerned for proper maintenance of their help documentation they discovered the next level of help file format. If to you html, presented as .chm, is the answer I won't stop you. Microsoft themselves, and this may well ensure Microsoft's future beyond Windows, have long ago gone over to making documentation available in the pdf format. And if the hyper markup language and pdf have nothing in common, my old brain begins to wonder. But do ahead and make people feel supporting this chm creator is worth it. I do not feel so, and this case is because of outdated type of file format. Those users who have used the format and got their own software years ago are not the type whom I address and you should have understood that very well.

I left this idea/suggestion this morning at about 4:20 AM on 03-04-2017 in the idea informer:
Allow edit, modify, and update of existing CHM.

After submitting the idea, the following was displayed:
"Your idea has been added. It will be published after moderation."

So it was accepted, but not posted, and was awaiting moderation. I know that the giveaway was over, but it still seems not to have been moderated. I have not had any luck posting using the idea informer; seems not to work for me. So I am reposting this idea.

Many links on Vole Media CHM main page [https://sanwhole.com/Products/VoleMediaCHM] are dead links
All of the 'More on voHelp' links on this page give error:
404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

Please update your links, and check your other pages.
Thanks

On download page [https://sanwhole.com/Products/Download];
Resource
Sanwhole Media CHM Classic Experience -> download link gives error:
404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

Please update the download page for this resource

There have been 2 flavors of help files for windows. First was the HLP and CNT files (help and contents files). They are outdated and no longer used. They were basically compiled rich text (RTF) files.

Then came along the CHM which is compiled help manual (HTML format) and that is the standard today. Don't be confused between HLP and CHM. CHM files were not supported in earlier versions of windows, and now, HLP files are no longer supported in the later versions of windows.

In order to create CHM files you need the MS HTML Help Workshop. As a developer, I have created several CHM files myself with just the Help Workshop. It is difficult and time consuming. It's likely you have several CHM files on your PC. You can do a search for them and double click on them to open them.

Vole appears to be a CHM creator. I have not tried it out yet and don't know if it requires the Help Workshop or not. If it does, it's likely to be automatically downloaded and installed along with Vole.

I too read some time ago that CHM ("Help") files were not to be used by software writers anymore. Also I had versions of Windows where you had to download a patch from Microsoft just to be able to view the .chm files on older software that still used them.

HOWEVER, it seems they have been "rehabilitated" by Microsoft and are now part of the accepted ways of making help files available to the user:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/917607/error-opening-help-in-windows-based-programs-feature-not-included-or-help-not-supported

Think of this program as a bit like MS Word, or a PDF creator. You enter all the things that someone might need to be able to understand how to use something, and then it compiles it all into a ".chm" help file, rather than say a ".docx" or ".pdf" file.

The good thing is that you can create from office file. The less good is the 1-year license (Microsoft Help Workshop 1.4 and 2.0 are free and not limited in time). Nevertheless, this GOTD is an opportunity to test this software ---test I won't do otherwise.

For those who don't know, CHM has been ported to multiple platforms (e.g. Linux) and is certainly not going to be outdated anytime soon because it's the best universal format for integrated help or standalone documentation in a single file.

In comparison, the newer HSX format is too tied to Microsoft, although very similar (so similar that conversion to/from CHM is very easy) and fits the bad habit of Microsoft to render obsolete excellent products (e.g. VB 6.0) just for the sake of it (read: M$$$ master of the world, lol).

After visiting the website and attempting to review the information there, I'm still not sure what exactly this software does. It does not appear to convert or present actual PowerPoint presentations. It looks more likely that this is a CHM creator that will embed text, video and graphics. Despite the reliance upon the outdated CHM format, this is somewhat interesting, especially at the prices quoted. Unfortunately, it is difficult to discover more about the software as documentation is limited and involves poorly translated English text. In addition, I cannot find information regarding how different editions of the software differ. Given these limitations, I simply didn't have the confidence in the software or developer to download this to my computer.

What is CHM?

Isn't CHM outdated now?