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Any free alternative to Robohelp? Prefer open source

Need some sort of online help authoring tool for an open source project.

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closed as off-topic by Bill the Lizard Jun 28 '13 at 16:29



5 Answers 5

Just remembered: depending on what you want to do, you can use doxygen (www.doxygen.org) or the free help tool from http://www.vizacc.com/.

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I'm not sure what's going on with vizacc.com (they just have a forum left), however you can download HelpMaker (the latest I'm aware of is 7.4.4) by simply googling it (e.g. from Softpedia - softpedia.com/get/Authoring-tools/Help-e-book-creators/…) –  stankovski Jan 5 '11 at 21:19

Check out this list of free help authoring tools, bound to be something useful there.

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Are you trying to make just CHM or other output formats too?

Take a look at DocBook. You can make (from one source file) pdf, html and chm - and some others, too. I've used it in the past but it's not very easy or convenient to use. If you only want to output chm (and need to use a free solution), see if you can get away with using the htmlhelp workshop (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc&displaylang=en).

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If you are trying to build .chm based help, try chm-build

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The project is in pre-alpha stage. Have you used it yourself? –  Constantin Oct 19 '08 at 19:22

I like Sphinx.


Sphinx can create HTML, Windows HTML help and PDF (via Latex).

I have created end-user documentation for two projects using Sphinx, and have also used it to document a couple of Python packages (Sphinx has a lot of features around extracting documentation from Python modules, it was originally created to write the Python documentation).

It is very easy to get started, and you get professional-looking documentation with a minimal effort.

If you are used to the WYSIWYG way of text editing, using a plain-text markup format might take some getting used to. But I believe it will be worth the effort.

I also have some experience with DocBook (one of the end-user documentation projects mentioned was a DocBook-to-Sphinx migration). I prefer Sphinx over Docbook: Plain text is more pleasant to work with than XML, Sphinx has a simpler toolchain.

See also:

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