Examples

Product Help Inspecting a Web Site or CD-ROM

Office Equipment CD-ROM

Suppose you are creating a CD-ROM for an office equipment supplier. You have produced all the web pages and now you want to provide an easy way for clients to find the right information.

Let Hi HelpIndex provide a Contents and Index for you!

Screen shot Office CD-ROM Contents Here's how the eventual implementation will look:
Try it for real.

You have arranged the Contents in a logical way, providing a Welcome page and Ordering Information first. Then the Products are all grouped together. Finally there is a list of Distributors and some Legal Stuff.

In this screen shot, the user has selected Computer Supplies in the Products section. If they select Display Page then the page computer.html will be displayed.
Screen shot Office CD-ROM Index This next screen shot shows the Index in action.

The user has typed in the letter P. Various keywords have been found: Pencils, Pens, Products, etc. The user has selected Products. Then various pages are listed. The user has selected Computer Supplies. The same page, computer.html, will be displayed.

How do I do that?

Screen shot of Office CD-ROM in Hi Lab Using Hi Lab it is easy to set up Hi HelpIndex. Here's what Hi Lab helps you to do:
  1. Scan your set of pages to build an "index data file".
  2. Edit the data file visually.
    As you can see from this screen shot, the Hi Lab display looks very similar to the Hi HelpIndex Contents.
  3. Build a new search web page which will call Hi HelpIndex.
  4. Test within Hi Lab.
  5. Release the Hi HelpIndex files and your index data file to your CD-ROM (or server).
Read the Getting started guide for more details.

Product Help

 Software developmers might like to use web pages for their help system, eg the help you get when you press F1 in a Windows program.

The standard Windows help system does not use web pages. However using web pages allows the documentation to be prepared easily and made available online.

With Hi HelpIndex, a software developer can add a Contents and Index to their product help system.

And hey! this is exactly what we have done with Hi Lab. This Windows program provides its help using web pages, and Hi HelpIndex provides the Contents and Index.

Note that users must have Internet Explorer installed for this help system to work. At present, Netscape Navigator may not be incorporated into a program in quite the same way.

Purchasers of our Developer Licence have access to the necessary source code. This is in C++ using the MFC classes, eg for use in Visual C++.

Inspecting a Web Site or CD-ROM

 Using Hi Lab by itself provides an easy way to get an overview of a web site or CD-ROM.

Simply scan the web pages to make a site Contents and Index. Do this by selecting File+New and opt to scan an existing web site. The web site can be on your own hard disk, on a CD-ROM or even an online site.

See also: Getting started guide, Scanning an existing web site,
More examples