The Pelnor Help Add-in is a help authoring tool that brings documentation and help creation into Visual Studio.  Build your documentation in the same place you build your software.  With the Pelnor Help Add-in creating and editing your program's documentation is as seamless as updating a control property in the Properties window.  Documenting becomes a quick and natural part of your software development.

Pelnor Help Add-in Features

• Create document files in PDF, and XPS file formats.
• Create HTML Help and Win Help projects.
• WYSIWYG Rich text editing.  Include your choice of fonts, images, tables, and hyperlinks.
• Screenshots are captured from within your running application.  Controls on the screenshots automatically become hyperlinked to their corresponding descriptions.
• Custom HelpProvider controls for Winforms and WPF.  Open your HTML help file to the correct topic automatically.
• Include title pages and indexes in your documents.
• Build documentation faster and easier.
• Compatible with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.

The Pelnor Help Add-in is an add-in for the Visual Studio development environment. It works with the Standard, Pro, and Team System versions of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. The Add-in creates Help Projects as HTML Help and as WinHelp. Documentation can also be created in the PDF and XPS file formats.

Designer Interaction – The Pelnor Help Add-in works by interacting with the Visual Studio Design surface for Windows Forms and WPF.  While Visual Studio is in design mode the add-in will detect which control on the design surface is selected.  As each control is selected its help descriptions will be loaded into the Pelnor Help Add-in’s rich text editor for viewing and alteration.

Screenshots - Screenshots of your application are captured by the Pelnor Help Provider.  While running your program in debug mode you can visit each form and initiate the screenshot capture.  During the form screenshot capture any tab controls on the form will be cycled through and an image for each tab will also be captured.  As images are collected the location of each control is recorded so that hyperlinks can be placed on the images in the final documentation.

PDF and XPS files can be directly output by the Pelnor Help Add-in. For HTML Help and Win Help the Add-in will output project files to a specified directory. These projects can then be built into help files using the Microsoft HTML Help Compiler or Win Help Compiler. If these compilers are installed the Add-in can launch them to build the projects automatically. The Pelnor Help Providers for Win forms and WPF work with your compiled HTML Help project(.CHM file). Simply set the Help Providers Namespace to the path of the .CHM file. Since the Add-in created the help project our Help Provider knows where each control should point for its documentation. No further linking is required.