Helpify provides a very simple means of generating HTML that is properly formatted for use as Apple Help, including navigation links, abstracts and the HTML comments used as segment commands by Apple Help. Though it’s not a full-blown help authoring tool, Helpify is used to create the help books for all current Omni Group products.

If your project is not too complex and you have a copy of OmniOutliner lying around, you might want to give Helpify a try. Big thanks to William and Omni for releasing this very useful tool!

The script uses a list of “small words” which are not capitalized based on guidelines from the New York Times Manual of Style.

It’s a Perl script, so save it as a text file and you can use it anywhere where Perl works. I use it as a system-wide service (with the shortcut Command-Shift-T) via Jesper’s excellent (and free) ThisService utility.

Thanks for a very useful addition to the writer’s toolbox!