Help files?

[webfork]

I need some experience writing manuals so I'm going to be authoring some program help files for in the near future. What do you prefer?

• Written format (FAQ-style, Manual style [intro, chapters, index, etc.], etc.)
• Online help or offline?
• Help file format (HTML, CHM, MHT, PDF, video, etc.)
  
  Note that the answer "all of the above" is okay, but where do you go first?

Also, we all know what crappy help looks like (hard to navigate, no real information, etc.), but do you have a favorite help method/file/location? Who does help right?

[joby_toss]

I like:
- manual style
- offline
- chm
- located in the same folder as the main executale
- named Help.chm or ExeName.chm
- accessible by F1 key
- for example, I like how Mouser from DonationCoder made them for his softwares (ScreenshotCaptor, FARR, CHAS)
- take a look at the freeware InfoHesiveEP for creating them (feature rich, but not portable).

[m^(2)]

Things that matter to me:
1. Search. The more advanced options - the better.
2. Contents. The more detailed docs - the better.

Other things are barely important, though the video option got me interested. I think it's a good or maybe very good for walkthroughs and (in many cases) examples, but terrible otherwise. That's because you can't search in it, can't skim through it, in most implementations you can't copy text from it to clipboard.

[Hydaral]

I like the single-page HTML/MHTML with a contents at the top that link to the sections. It's cross-platform, it should even open on portable devices, and if you need to search you can just use the browser's search.

Kind of like this, could use a bit of prettying up though:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

I believe there may be an application that you can write help documentation in and it can export to many different formats. I can't think where I saw it though.

[tproli]

Format is almost irrelevant to me but I second Hydaral's comment on HTML. You can put it online and make part of the download package (if any). You can easily spice it up with some javascript animation (hiding details, scroll to sections, etc.). What is more important to me is a clean, airy layout.

[SYSTEM]

I like:
- manual style
- offline
- chm
- located in the same folder as the main executale
- named Help.chm or ExeName.chm
- accessible by F1 key

I agree with all that.

[webfork]

So I originally posted about this because I had planned on working with developers to generate help docs. Unfortunately, I was so frustrated by the lack of good help file generation tools that I never really did anything here.

Most of the documentation I've put together has been in LibreOffice files, which probably with limited work could get pushed over to HTML/CHM.

Has anyone had an experience generating software help files? Any new preferences versus what was described by Joby / SYSTEM back in 2011?