CompuServe Messages

I'm just beginning my first CD project also. I have learned quite a lot about Microsoft Viewer. The Beta for the version 2.0 of Viewer just shipped, and I also just got back from a 2-day Microsoft Viewer class. The way I think of Viewer is as an enhanced version of Windows Help. If you look at Windows Help, you'll see that it supports hypertext quite nicely, as well as some other features such as embedded graphics, history lists, etc. Viewer is the same but with more features. The biggest single feature is the full-text search engine. Viewer also supports more flexibility in screen layout, and comes with libraries you can call into for multimedia support. Like Help, you have to use .RTF format to compile your title, and there aren't currently any third-party tools that let you compose and edit in a really interactive WYSIWYG way — with the exception of tools like RoboHelp (from Blue Sky, with a 2.0 version due out pretty soon), which are good at composing Help titles, and can also be used for that subset of Viewer authoring. I don't know about "Ntergaid". Can you fill us in? Viewer seems to be best for publishing tasks where there are lots of pages of text, and you want a fair amount of hypertext among them. Anything fancy you want to do you'll have to write C code for, since Viewer doesn't support it directly. However, at least Viewer DOES support calling out to DLLs, so the hooks are there. For example, in Cinemania, there is a very nice looking "remote control" device that appears on screen that the user manipulates to make things happen. That was implemented in C code outside of Viewer, but Viewer calls it and it calls into Viewer to manipulate things. I have also played with ToolBook. I like ToolBook better for prototyping, since it's all interactive and interpreted (not like Viewer, which is compiled). But there are enough things that I don't like about ToolBook that I wouldn't consider it for publishing large amounts of text.