The manuals, tutorials, and descriptive books about TeX and its allied products are fairly comprehensive, but their very technical completeness means that the novice user is often unable to locate quickly the information needed from among the quantity provided. Many new users also ask, "where is the HELP file?" and too often receive an unsatisfactory response.
This paper describes the construction of a memory-resident pop-up help facility for TeX on PCs, developed using publicly-available software. The problems discussed include determining the level of complexity that a help system needs; the balance between fine and coarse detail; cross-referencing and circular references; context-sensitivity; visual presentation; the selection of topics; the regard for later conversion to other systems with structured help facilities (e.g., VMS); and the development of tools for assisting the help file development process. The help file itself, when completed, will be made available with the distributable software in the public archives.