HTML Help Builder
In legacy applications for Windows, it is common to provide integrated help using the HTML Help system. The free HTML Workshop from Microsoft includes the HTML Help Compiler (hhc.exe), but is rather limited in being able to develop the actual help system files and structure.
There are a number of third-party applications available which provide assistance in building the help project files, however our experience is that they are either not free and open source, are limited in the format of the resulting help files, or are restrictive in terms of licensing. Thus the reason for developing our own utility.
All help system project files (including configuration options) are stored as plain text (or XML) files. This allows collaboration during help system development, using tools such as git to manage all changes to the help project source code repository.
The graphical user interface provides for easy management of the help system directory tree, along with WYSIWYG development of the individual help pages.
The system also supports the use of templates for HTML formatting.
Although we have never formally released HTML Help Builder (HHB), there is a working "proof of concept" version available on GitHub, which we use for preparing the HTML Help files for our Windows projects. The code has been developed in C#, and is available under the GNU General Public License.