MS Help 3 wont see the light of day until later this year (he says with finger in air) when VS 2010 Beta 2 hits the street. At that time the pressure will be on for all VS help integrators to migrate their Help 2 content to the new MS Help 3 format.
Until now details on the MS Help 3 format has been rather sketchy. Today I’m please to make two announcements.
Firstly a white paper describing the main concepts of MS Help 3
Also I’ve upload FAR HTML 5.0 Beta which delivers support for editing MS Help 3 content. Specifically TOC, Index, F1 and general h3 meta tag editing. Best place to start is in the “Help 3″ page in FAR’s TOC & Index Editor.
FAR 5 also delivers a new Tag Editor which makes it easy to work with MS Help 1/2/3 tags across hundreds of HTML files.
Both FAR 5 Beta and the Help 3 documentation will continue to evolve as Microsoft release more material to ISVs.
I’d love to hear any feedback you might have (see the contacts page).
With my MVP hat on :- If you’re a Help ISV and don’t have access to H3 information, please contact April Reagan [Microsoft Help team in Redmond, Seattle]. Or contact me and I will pass you April’s contact details.
Rob
April Reagan has now moved on to work for the MS Surface team. Paul O’Rear [MSFT] is now best contact for all things Help 3 (Or you can contact myself or the Help MVP).