Since Jelp requires RTF files, you can use your favorite help authoring tool to create your content. Jelp 2.0 now supports multiple RTF files, so all you need to provide to create a Jelp system is your help project file (.hpj) and your contents file (.cnt). On the iMaven project, I had close to 550 topics. I had a separate RTF file for overview topics, configuration topics, system management topics, material management topics, glossary terms, and context-sensitive help.

Writing and formatting text. Before writing and formatting your help files for a Jelp project, you should review the Jelp bug list. As of Jelp 2.0, some bullet list and heading styles don't convert, backslashes and apostrophes don't appear properly, and topic IDs that contain question marks or colons will not convert. For details and workarounds on these issues, see step 4, Review and modify your booklet files.

Designing context-sensitive help. Jelp provides a simple API for integrating context-sensitive help. For the iMaven project, I provided window-level help, not field level help because of the time constraints imposed on our programmers. Although field-level help is supported in Jelp (with the F1 key), I focused on just producing a topic for each dialog box. Users could access this type of help with a Help button. These window-level topics explained the purpose of the dialog box and listed each item as a pop-up as illustrated in Figure 1. I organized all field-level topics in one RTF file and created a glossary of dialog boxes.
Figure 1. A sample help topic for a dialog box in a Jelp system. The sample popup shows the embedded help capabilities of Jelp--you can have a popup within a popup.

Developing graphics. Jelp supports BMP, GIF, and JPEG files. The main thing to remember is when you insert your graphics, you'll need to reference them and not place them inline. Furthermore, ensure that you place the graphics in the same directory where the RTF file is located.