QuickHelp Linux 1.0
Professional Online Help for Linux Applications

Placitas, NM ­ February 8, 2002 - Excel Software today announced the
availability of QuickHelp for Linux.  QuickHelp is a development tool for
quickly creating and distributing online help for Linux applications.  Help
information for Linux has traditionally been delivered as ReadMe files, man
pages or a loose collection of html files.  These approaches are awkward and
inadequate for new GUI programs arriving on Linux as it moves to the desktop
in more organizations.  QuickHelp brings professional online help to Linux
KDE and GNOME desktops.

QuickHelp consists of a QuickHelp Builder for creating help systems and a
QuickHelp Viewer for deploying them to end-users. The help information
resides in a single XML file distributed with the QuickHelp Viewer.

For the end-user, QuickHelp supports a table of contents, an index with
automatic search field, word searches across topics, color highlighted topic
text with hypertext links and context sensitive help from applications.
QuickHelp presents a window with a Contents and Index tab.  The Contents panel
shows a table of contents and the selected topic.  Users can expand or
collapse topics in the Contents tree or click items to view help topics.  The
Index panel shows an index word list and the selected topic.  Each word has a
list of related topics that can be viewed.  Type in the Search field to
quickly locate a topic or use the Find dialog to locate all topics containing
specific text.  The forward and backward buttons navigate through recently
viewed topics.

For the developer, QuickHelp provides a highly productive editing environment
to create, verify and maintain application help.  The QuickHelp Builder has
the same Contents and Index panels as the QuickHelp Viewer but adds the Edit
and General panels for editing the help file.  The Edit panel is used to add,
edit, delete or move topics within the Contents tree.  It contains fields for
defining index words or context sensitive identifier strings that link topics
to application menus and dialogs for context sensitive help.  The General
panel contains buttons for saving, opening, closing, verifying or importing
help topics or listing help topics to a text file.

The QuickHelp Builder handles administrative activities like maintaining
links between topics, reordering topics and locating bad links or missing
indexes.  Its intuitive design enables a developer to productively begin help
building in minutes.  At any time, the developer can see or use the same
working help system that the end-user will see by simply clicking the
Contents or Index tab.

QuickHelp Linux is $295 and includes the QuickHelp Builder, a license to
freely distribute the QuickHelp Viewer and interface glue code for Kylix
(Borland's IDE for Linux) applications.  Site licensing information, product
descriptions and online ordering are available at www.excelsoftware.com.
Excel Software has over 15 years of experience in providing tools to
thousands of Macintosh, Windows and Linux developers in over 30 countries.

Excel Software
Ph: (505) 771-3719
Fax: (505) 771-3718
Web: http://www.excelsoftware.com
Email: info@excelsoftware.com