Microsoft Multimedia Viewer or simply Viewer was a multimedia authoring tool for

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built upon

WinHelp Microsoft WinHelp is a proprietary format for online help files that can be displayed by the Microsoft Help browser ''winhelp.exe'' or ''winhlp32.exe''. The file format is based on Rich Text Format (RTF). It remained a popular Help platform from ...

online help format. The toolkit was used to develop Microsoft's early Windows CD-ROM reference titles like

Encarta Microsoft ''Encarta'' is a discontinued Digital data, digital multimedia encyclopedia and search engine published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also available online via annual subscription, although ...

, Cinemania and

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, as well as for a number of third-party multimedia titles for

Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series run as a shell on top of MS-DOS; it was the last Windows 1 ...

like the CD-ROM edition of '' The Merck Manual.'' Just like WinHelp files, Viewer files were compiled from

Rich Text Format ) As an example, the following RTF code would be rendered as follows: This is some bold text. Character encoding A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. ...

(RTF) source documents. Users of both WinHelp and Multimedia Viewer authoring tools noted similarities between them. Some tools for .htm file decompiling, like WinHelp Decompiler (open source) or Herd Software'
Help to RTF
can extract them from Viewer's .mvb files. The development of Viewer, initially named "WinDoc" and "WinBook," began in 1989. The initial version was released in September 1991 as a part of the Multimedia Development Kit, with a version 2.0 announced in 1993. Software bundles which included the publishing toolkit were priced at $495 with a royalty-free runtime version. A custom version of Viewer 2.0, limited to 25 topics, was included with a $39.95 tutorial book published in 1994 by the Waite Group. In addition to titles for Windows-based PCs, Multimedia Viewer could compile titles for Tandy Video Information System and other Modular Windows systems, as well as Sony Multimedia CD-ROM Player, a portable

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

-based

CD-ROM XA A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

reader released in 1992. Viewer did not support a concurrent

CD-I The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I, later CD-i) is a digital optical disc data storage format as well as a hardware platform, co-developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips and Japanese company Sony. It was created as an extension of CDDA ...

data format, with

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, Microsoft's vice president of Multimedia & Consumer Systems at the time, being dismissive of it as "not based on any standard."

Reception

In a 1992 comparison of five multimedia authoring tools, including

Authorware Adobe Authorware (previously Macromedia Authorware, originally Authorware) is a discontinued e-learning authoring tool with its own interpreted, flowchart-based, graphical programming language. Authorware was used for creating interactive e-lear ...

and Macromind Director, Jim Canning of ''InfoWorld'' awarded Viewer 1.0 the lowest score across the board. The journalist praised Viewer's full-text search ability and noted it's the only one reviewed which could be used to build

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...

. However, he criticized its lack of animation support and a "tedious and error-prone" word processor-based workflow. While Viewer 1.0 was intended to be the main tool to build the original edition of Encarta, the encyclopedia's developers deemed it inadequate for the task. 34% of total Encarta code was added to build features which Viewer could not provide on its own, according to its developers’ accounts. A preliminary version of Viewer 2.0 was made available to the Encarta team before the new version of the authoring tool was fully completed.

Notes

Works cited

* * {{Cite book , last=Moody , first=Fred , url=https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1270724M/I_sing_the_body_electronic , title=I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier , publisher=Viking , year=1995 , isbn=9780670848751 , ol=1270724M , language=en 1991 software Hypertext Multimedia Viewer Windows text-related software