This team blog intends to provide interesting and useful info about Technical Communication Suite, FrameMaker, RoboHelp and related issues in Technical Communication.
Contributors include Mahesh Kumar Gupta, Product Manager - Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Technical Communication Suite and Ankur Jain - Product Manager, Adobe RoboHelp. There is also an active contribution from members of the product engineering teams.
This is the third post of the 'RoboHelp 8 List' blog series. In this blog we will focus on 'Paragraph Autonumbering' functionality.
1. What is Paragraph Autonumbering?
Many times we need to create captions with numbering for images or tables, or simply number the sections etc.; for example in this blog heading of all the sections are auto-numbered. Paragraph Autonumbering can prove to be very effective in such cases.
Paragraph Autonumbering allows user to define a paragraph style with numbering or bullets. When the user applies paragraph style to pre-selected text, RoboHelp adds pre-defined paragraph numbering to the text. Auto numbered paragraph content is similar to a multilevel list content. The scope of Numbering is at the topic level.
2. How to create Paragraph Autonumbering?
You can create an auto numbered paragraph style using button. 'List for Autonumbering' dialog will popup.
To make auto numbering (as shown above), do the following
• Select 'Numbering'
• Do the required prefix formatting
• Apply 'Prefix Style' (Optional)
• Press 'OK'
RoboHelp allows you to auto-number paragraph in multilevel scope too. To create paragraph Autonumbering in multilevel scope (as shown below), do the following
• Select the 'Inherit Numbering Property from Multilevel List' check-box
• Select 'List Class'
• Select 'List Level'
• Press 'OK'
3. How to apply Autonumbered Paragraph style?
To apply this 'Autonumbered paragraph' style,
• Select the content in your topic
• Click on 'Apply Style' combo, and select the Paragraph Style (e.g. "1. Heading 1" in the below image)
4. Why Paragraph Autonumbering?
• Different users may visualize their document structure differently. When you visualize the content as paragraph not as a list you should create paragraph Autonumbering.
• When you need to create a list repetitively, then using Autonumbered Paragraph takes single step to auto number it.
Hope you found this blog series on 'RoboHelp 8 List' functionality useful. Please continue to share your valuable feedback with us.
Multilevel lists can be either single level or multiple levels. This feature is probably much richer than what many of us think.
Creating multilevel list
Select paragraph or any existing list or put the cursor where you want to create your list.
Either press (Create a Multilevel List) or go to Format > list -> Multilevel list
A dialog will appear. Choose a list style or template and press ok.
The selected content will be changed into chosen list style. If selected content has a list with levels then its level will be update based on the selected style.
Press tab or shift tab to change the level of selected list items.
List structure:
Multilevel list can have up to 9 levels. Each level can have the following properties and they get applied to the selected paragraph.
These properties can be modified using the List style definition dialog as mentioned below
Numbering Behavior:
The scope of 'numbering' of Multilevel list is defined at the topic level. Multilevel list items need not be adjacent or contiguous to retain the numbering sequence. Different items of the same Multilevel list can be in different blocks within a topic and its number is sequenced. You can also write any content between two items of multilevel list without having to choose to restart or continue numbering.
List Indentation & Margin control
User may control the margin space and indentation space of the Multilevel list as shown below.
User may control the margin spacing using buttons present in the style dialog or through the Style sheet (.css) file
Let's take the following example of multilevel List
The style of this Multilevel list is defined in style sheet (.css) as
Multilevel Prefix
Any Multilevel list prefix can have text in the following format in list style dialog.
<text><x|1-9><text>
<x|1-9>: This denotes level number. These will be replaced with sequence value with specified list style like (1,2,3, ...) or (a,b,c, ...) or custom sequence. This could be <x> or <1> or <2> or <3> up to <9>. <1> means first level, <x> means current level of list item.
<text>: Here text could be anything arournd level number. This text will appear as it is in the prefix.
Following are some examples of required 'list numbering' and its correponding 'prefix
text':
Custom Sequencing:
RoboHelp provides five numbering sequence options in list style (viz. decimal, upper-alpha, lower-alpha, upper-roman, lower-roman) and 30+ bullet options. In addition, RoboHelp also allows you to define your own custom sequence. To create a custom sequence, use the List style dialog:
Press 'New...'
Press 'Add Sequence' and name it
Type entries in 'Edit Sequence'
Press 'Add' to add more entries in the sequence.
Press 'OK'.
List style dialog will automatically choose the sequence you had defined. If the number of list items exceeds the number of entries in the sequence, then the sequence will get repeated.
Restart/ continue numbering
You may restart/continue numbering of any multilevel list items by following these steps:
Right click on list item.
Select "List Style..." option
A dialog will popup, select "Restart numbering at" check box and choose a number from where you want to restart. If you want to continue just deselect "Restart numbering at" check box.
Close the dialog
As always, please continue to share your feedback and suggestions.
Today's web-friendly writing style requires authors to use lists heavily and in different styles and formats. In earlier versions (RH7 or before) of RoboHelp, list <li> was tightly integrated with paragraph <p> tag. This was done to achieve same 'look and feel' of paragraph and its numbering, single place style editing and ease of use for a normal user. Sometimes users face numbering, indentation and margin challenges with these lists.
In RoboHelp 8, we have streamlined and enhanced the list feature. You can now create style based simple bulleted and numbered lists in standard HTML format. You can also create multilevel list, which supports a high degree of customization like prefix text control, auto numbering, custom sequencing, list mingling, indentation and
spacing control.
In this blog, I will explain the differences between these lists based on different parameters. I will also explain how to migrate a list from one format into another.
1. Bulleted and numbered (HTML) List
In earlier version (RH7 or before), If you create a list it would
be like this
<ol type="i">
<li><p>HTML List (HTML standard)</p></li>
<li><p>Multilevel List (Proprietary list)</p></li>
</ol>
In HTML standard, list <li> can be created without paragraph <p> tag. If a list is created without paragraph <p> tag then it would have same 'look and feel' of paragraph, it's numbering and single place style editing.
In RH8 user can create a standard list<li> style (in style pod or CSS editor dialog by New >List Style), and using this list style user can create a list without paragraph <p> tag. This can be achieved in following way
Type some paragraphs
Select those paragraphs
To apply list style, either
double click the list style in style pod listed in List styles , or
go to format > List > bullet numbering. A dialog will popup select the custom tab, Select the style listed and press OK.
To check your HTML list if it is with or without paragraph <p> tag, position the cursor in the list and look for the style in Apply style combo. In the example below "(none)" indicates this list is without paragraph <p> tag. You may apply "(none)" style to your HTML list to remove paragraph tag from the list.
2. Multilevel List
This is new list introduced in RH8, to achieve high degree of customization which is not available in standard HTML list.
Features
HTML List
Multilevel List
Design
It is a container element which can contain any HTML content like paragraph, table, list, text box.
It is part of paragraph. It adds calculated prefix into the paragraph
to create a list.
Numbering Scope
Block level - List numbering is continuous within a block. It is not easy to add content between two list entries with continuous numbering.
Topic level - You may add any content between two list entries without losing the continuity.
Prefix Text Control
HTML list does not have such functionality.
You may add any text around the numbering.
Paragraph Auto Numbering
RH 7 (or earlier) version achieves Autonumber list by bundling paragraph <p> and list<li> styles. The same functionality in RH8 is achieved using Multilevel list.
User can create an auto numbered paragraph style using button. Autonumbering dialog will popup.
Custom Sequencing
HTML list does not have such functionality.
This functionality is available in Multilevel list.
List Mingling
HTML list does not have such functionality.
Different list entries can be mingled. Like Table list, figure list, heading list can exist simultaneously.
Indentation and Spacing Control
User can control indentation of list. Incase list element has paragraph with tag, and paragraph also has some indentation, then different browsers may render it differently. Technically user can achieve spacing between prefix and text, but this can sometimes be complex and different browsers compatibility might be a challenge.
Multilevel list is part of paragraph, hence, the list indentation, if provided, will override paragraph indentation. Thus it has single point indentation control. User may control spacing between prefix and text into the list.
Limitation: - As multilevel list is not a HTML standard list, it generates hard space ( ) to make required spacing between prefix and text.
Migration of lists
HTML list can be converted to multilevel list and vice versa. This can be achieved by selecting the list and applying another list style to it.
I will provide more details on the Autonumbering and multilevel list functionality in RH8 in my next blog. Please stay tuned and continue to provide your valuable feedback.
I met some of you during Tekom conference and it was wonderful interacting with you. I must thank you all for the great positive feedback you shared for TCS2 and FM9.
Your enhancements requests are definitely in my consideration set. Obviously, as a strategy guy, I am looking at the short term next release as well as the longer term roadmap.
You mentioned that more information is needed regarding TCS2 features. I am sharing the link for TCS2 Reviewer's guide again. It has many tutorials on the suite workflows as well as point product value additions. The Reviewer's Guide was developed as a pdf portfolio. I am sure you have already explored this new feature of Acrobat 9. TCS2 also gives you this value addition. You can also see the portfolio below:
Thanks for the feedback that you have shared with us on RoboHelp 8. We have tried addressing the pressing issues via RoboHelp 8.0.1 patch. In addition to resolving the RoboHelp issues, this patch also improves the FrameMaker-RoboHelp interaction for the Technical Communication Suite users. Robohelp 8.0.1 patch is live now and is available through Adobe Update Manager (AUM). RoboHelp 8 users can check for updates through Help>Update Menu in RoboHelp 8.
List of major issues resolved in this update:
1. Slow loading of topics in display panel
2. Data loss on spell checking project when all topics are closed and 'User Defined Variables' (UDV) Pod is open
3. Popup showed blank on applying a CSS to multiple topics after importing a topic from previous version of RoboHelp.
4. Popup Window for related topics not opening near the related topics button when a large topic is created.
5. Table loses its width setting in Printed Documentation
6. Table with straddled rows and columns are lost on mapping it with any RoboHelp table
7. User defined indent changes and gets incorrect in case of a multilevel list
8. Table displays an extra column in some situations
9. Vertical alignment not shown properly when explicitly set using CSS.
10. RoboHelp HTML crashes when executing sample script for "UDV converter with UI"
11. All the panes are not visible in Browser based AIR Help using startpage.htm#path/targettopic.htm url.
12. RoboHelp 8 does not add space between the expanding Hotspot and the expanding text.
13. Dropdown text not suppressed by Conditional Build Tag in Printed Documentation
14. Different options e.g. Font, font size, zoom etc stop working on changing the image of any icon on the formatting toolbar and restarting RoboHelp.
15. Remove Unused Index Keywords menu item was disabled and hence the functionality wasn't available
16. Show/Hide in a MiniTOC in a Topic placed inside a folder works only in Internet Explorer
17. Clicking on Home breadcrumbs in child project in Browser Based Merged AIR Help opens up default topic of child project.
18. Incorrect order of topics displayed or RoboHelp HTML crashes on toggling between folders and TOC on TOC page layout when multi level Folder architecture is present in Project Manager.
19. RoboHelp 8 Compiler not working properly with the RoboHelp 8 Command Prompt.
20. CSH call of offline help for non-Unicode applications doesn't work for second time
Issues related to RoboHelp - FrameMaker Integration (Technical Communication Suite) resolved in this update:
21. Slow response time to Link multiple .fm files (e.g. two 7 MB files) as compared to linking single (14 MB) .fm file
22. Some images set in the FrameMaker's Anchored Frame missing in RoboHelp.
23. Some of the cross references not getting converted into hyperlinks for FrameMaker Book9
24. Multiple instances of FrameMaker launched on generating FrameMaker book with multiple big documents.
25. CBT is applied wrongly in RoboHelp if the conditional expression is applied on any anchored frame in the FrameMaker document.
RoboHelp 8.0.1 resolves few other issues in addition to the ones listed above. Please apply this patch, and continue to share your feedback with us.
Like every year, this year too it will be a great opportunity to meet many of you during the largest European Technical Communication conference, Tekom 2009.
This conference held in the city of Wiesbaden helps me in connecting with you in person.
Many of my colleagues from different groups like marketing and engineering would also be present. If you want to setup a meeting with me, please let me know and we can schedule a meeting at the conference venue.
Preparing Anchored Frame for conversion in RoboHelp
When FrameMaker content containing Anchored Frame is imported to RoboHelp, the Anchored Frame is converted to corresponding image in generated XHTML content. The quality of generated images has been an area of concern. While some users are satisfied with the quality of images generated, others feel the scope of improvement in the image quality.
This blog describes some of the best practices and workflows that will help obtain improved quality of generated images. In other words, it will allow users to maintain the original quality of source images generated through specialized image editing applications.
Use Reference Images in FrameMaker
FrameMaker provides following two options while importing an image file into a document:
Import By Reference : A reference to the image file on disk is kept inside the document
Copy Into Document : Image data is embedded into the document
"Import By Reference" method should be preferred if it is not absolutely necessary to choose the other option. This reduces the size of the FM document and allows RoboHelp to maintain the original image quality by referring to the original image.
Use Zero Dimension Image setting in RoboHelp
RoboHelp imports the dimensions of anchored frame and specify them in the corresponding <img> tag of generated XHTML topic. This leads to resizing of image when the topic is viewed in a browser. Sometimes, some resized images look distorted in some browsers. RoboHelp provides a functionality of omitting height/width attribute in the generated <img> tag thus avoiding the resizing of generated images. This tweak can be applied by setting the "Preferred Dimensions" to zero in Conversion Settings dialog.
Use Web supported Images
The copying of reference images is effective only if the referred image has one of the web supported format viz. JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF. In case, an image with any other format is used, RoboHelp needs to regenerate the image in order to convert it to Web supported image format. So, if it is not absolutely necessary, a web supported image version of image may be used in FM documents. In case, it is necessary to use other image formats for Print workflows in FrameMaker, two versions of images may be used in the document with Conditions applied on them. One condition may be enabled for Printing and another for Online publishing. These conditions can be manipulated in either FrameMaker or RoboHelp.
Avoid unnecessary content in Anchored Frame
As it is understood, if the anchored frame contains more than one object, RoboHelp needs to generate one single image. So, unnecessary content e.g. empty Text Frame, text frame with only a marker, object hidden behind an image etc. may be avoided.
Replacing Images
In case the above workflows are not feasible to meet the requirements, the images may be replaced with desired better quality images. This may be achieved through scripting. Other workflows can include post processing the images using Photoshop scripting.
I hope these steps will prove fruitful in obtaining better quality images.
Style Mapping in TCS 2 - RoboHelp Way or FrameMaker Way?
FrameMaker provides a Print authoring environment and is best suited for print and PDF publishing. However, RoboHelp provides an HTML authoring environment and is best suited for online publishing. The content in the two forms need to have different look and feel to suit the purposes of different mediums. Hence, there is a need to allow for swift and efficient conversion of look and feel of the content being imported from FrameMaker to RoboHelp.
Technical Communication Suite 2 provides two separate functionalities for achieving this easy conversion.
RoboHelp Way
FrameMaker Way
This blog discusses about which method is suitable for what purpose and for what type of authors.
ROBOHELP WAY
When a FrameMaker document is linked/imported in RoboHelp, RoboHelp allows a user to specify the changes in the look and feel of the document. The look and feel of a document is mainly decided by the kind of styling it uses. RoboHelp allows a user to specify a RoboHelp style for each FrameMaker style by which the FrameMaker style will be replaced after importing the content.
For example, a user may have the following Heading 1 style defined in FrameMaker
Now he/she may want it to look like as follows in RoboHelp
In order to achieve this user needs to do the following steps
Link the FrameMaker document in RoboHelp project.
Goto File->Project Settings
Goto "Import" tab of Project Settings dialog
Click "Edit" button for conversion settings for FrameMaker documents
Select "Heading 1" Style under "Paragraph" tree item on the left
Select "Heading 1" from the "RoboHelp Style" drop down on the right.
In case user wants to modify the look and feel of Heading 1 style, it can be edited in RoboHelp's powerful style editor which can be invoked by clicking the "Edit Style" button
Click OK on both the dialogs.
This specifies that Heading 1 style of FrameMaker should be replaced with Heading 1 style of CSS specified in RoboHelp. In this manner, all other styles can be mapped. This functionality not only covers Paragraph styles but also extends to character styles and table formats.
RoboHelp provides a predefined CSS called RHStyleMapping.css for this purpose. This CSS may be modified by the user. If the user has predefined CSS style, he/she can point RoboHelp to use the styles from the particular CSS. This can be done by selecting the CSS for style mapping in the Import tab of Project Settings dialog as marked in the screenshot above.
FRAMEMAKER WAY
RoboHelp provides another approach for style mapping. Instead of going through CSS route, a user may create a template in FrameMaker having styles designed for online publishing. This template can then be specified in RoboHelp using "Apply FrameMaker Template before import" option in Project Settings dialog. Once this is done, RoboHelp applies the FrameMaker Template temporarily on linked documents at the time of conversion of FrameMaker content to RoboHelp content. The process of application of FrameMaker template on FrameMaker documents is similar to FrameMaker's "Import Formats" functionality. Once FrameMaker template is defined in RoboHelp, the author need not map styles manually as described above.
WHICH METHOD TO USE?
The RoboHelp method operates around CSS editing. So, for users who are conversant with CSS authoring can leverage this functionality to design Online specific CSS styles to suite the Online published output requirements.
Users who find CSS authoring an overhead and are more comfortable working with FrameMaker's style designer can skip the CSS editing and may opt for The FrameMaker method. He/she simply needs to author his/her styles in FrameMaker and use the particular document as a template in RoboHelp.
However, besides the comfort level for each method, there could be other reasons for which a user may want to choose a specific method. There are functionalities which are limited to a particular method and may not be available it the other method.
For example, RoboHelp provides a rich interface for designing advanced table patterns which is not possible in FrameMaker. On the other hand, FrameMaker provides autonumber functionality in Paragraph styles which is available in totally different form in RoboHelp.
Users who are good authors but are not comfortable in designing styles either way may use predefined CSS and/or template and can specify them in RoboHelp using RoboHelp's Project Settings dialog.
Thus both the methods are useful for different purposes and for different users. It depends on an author to choose one of them as per the expertise and requirements as described. Advanced users may use the two methods simultaneously to take advantages of both the approaches.
Getting started: Exploring Technical Communication Suite 2
If you are a FrameMaker author looking forward to publish your FrameMaker content in various output formats or if you are a beginner trying to start with Technical Communication Suite 2, then this blog is meant for you. This blog helps a user explore all the areas of the product relevant for a beginner.
The integration of FrameMaker and RoboHelp in Technical Communication Suite 2 is an end to end solution for publishing FrameMaker authored content in various publishing formats including
Air Help
Web Help
HTML Help
Flash Help
Printed output(PDF, DOC)
One can author his/her help content in FrameMaker or can start with legacy FrameMaker content. Once the FrameMaker content is finalized and author is ready to publish it, it can be linked in RoboHelp for further tweaks and publishing into various formats.
In order to bring FrameMaker content into RoboHelp, one need to start with creating a new RoboHelp project or opening an existing project in RoboHelp. The FrameMaker file (book/document) can be linked in RoboHelp project from File menu
Or Right click menu
Once the file is selected, RoboHelp scans the files (including all chapters and sub-books in case of a book) to read document catalogs and to create an exact replica of the chapter hierarchy in case of a book. The FrameMaker documents appear as linked documents in RoboHelp Project Manager Pane.
One can specify to import the TOC, Index and Glossary content from the linked document properties.
Settings related to style mappings, cross reference mappings, image conversion, file splitting, conditions, autonumber conversion, applying template etc. can be mentioned using Conversion settings dialog. It can be accessed from File->Project Settings->Import Tab
These settings can be saved or exported for reuse and can be extended to other projects.
Once these settings are done, FM content can be imported in RoboHelp using the Generate/Update menu. This content can then be published to any of available output formats from Single Source Layouts Pane.
Thus, TCS 2 provides an end to end solution starting with authoring of content in FrameMaker and finally publishing it using RoboHelp's Single Source Layouts.
Please note that, RoboHelp maintains a live link to FrameMaker files. This means that whenever the FrameMaker content is updated, RoboHelp notifies the user that the content has been updated and it can be reimported into RoboHelp. Thus, an author can edit his/her content as many times as he/she wants and can publish it any point of time.
Also, the FrameMaker content imported in RoboHelp can be locally tweaked for publishing. The look and feel of the content can be managed using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
This is how one can start exploring the product. This product has a very rich feature set for advanced users which is not covered in this blog. My previous blogpost http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/07/framemaker-robohelp_integration_in_tcs_revamped_myth_or_trut.html talks about the various useful features of the product.
One can keep exploring and learning this rich and easy to use product. One may keep following this blog to have further understanding of the product.
All the Best!!!
Mayank Agrawal
RoboHelp Engineering Team
Summary: A critical vulnerability exists in the current version of RoboHelp Server 8. This vulnerability could result in an unauthenticated user uploading and executing arbitrary code.
Solution: Adobe recommends all RoboHelp Server 8 users update their RoboHelp installations by applying the update using the instructions below:
1. Stop Tomcat service if its running.
2. Backup the following files:
a. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\Publish.class
b. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\Publish$1.class
c. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\Publish$PublishData.class
d. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\Publish$SessionData.class
e. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\Publish$SessionManager.class
f. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\CircularArray.class
g. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\CServerConstants.class
h. \WEB-INF\classes\adobe\robohelp\server\RoboHelpServer.class
i. \WEB-INF\web.xml
3. Extract and copy the files from the update zip to the relevant folder. Select "Yes to All" at the "Confirm Folder Replace" prompt.
4. Start Tomcat service.
A Security Advisory has been posted in regards to the RoboHelp Server 8 issue as mentioned in the Adobe RoboHelp blog on September 4 ("Potential RoboHelp Server 8 Issue"). A critical vulnerability exists in the current version of RoboHelp Server 8. This vulnerability could result in an unauthenticated user uploading and executing arbitrary code.
We are in the process of developing a fix for the issue, and expect to provide an update by September 18, 2009.
Adobe is aware of reports of a remote pre-authentication exploit in RoboHelp Server 8. We are currently investigating this potential issue and will have an update once we get more information.
Open letter to our Customers on the recent Customer Support issues
In the recent past, there have been increasing instances of dissatisfaction with Adobe's Customer Support. Lambert Walsh, Vice President - Technical Services @ Adobe, recently issued an open letter to Adobe Customers on what is being done to address this situation.
Please note that any unresolved issues can also be directed to adbecare@adobe.com for help.
User-Defined Variable in RoboHelp 8: Brighter and Better
RoboHelp 8 has renewed User-defined Variables (UDV) by allowing formatting inside the value of UDV
A formatted UDV can have any inline HTML content. Following is the list of HTML components which can be a part of formatted UDV.
Plain Text
Text Formatting like Bold, Italic, Underline, Font, color etc
Links
Images, Multimedia
Conditional Text
Any other inline HTML content
Example: - A formatted UDV AdobeCopyright contains the logo as well as copyright text with link. Variable Set Variable sets provide a way to have different values for a single UDV. User Defined Variable pane provides an easy way to modify the value of UDV for different Variable Sets. Select any Variable set from Variable Set Combo in the User Defined Variables pane and modify the value of any UDV in the Design or HTML editor. is used to create/manage UDV. Other Variable Sets are linked to default Variable Set. You need to change the required UDV value only in different variable set; all other variables will have values from default Variable Set. You may choose a Variable Set in the Single Source Layouts dialogs to get a specific value of your UDV.
Uses of Formatted UDV A Formatted UDV can be a part of any of the following RoboHelp project/HTML component.
Topics
Snippet
Master Pages
Drop-Down Text
Expanding Text
You may use Formatted UDV for variable as well as reusable content within a project. This is a powerful feature of RoboHelp supporting single sourcing. You may change the value of UDV at a single place and it gets reflected at all locations wherever it is used.
One needs to play around with this feature and apply creativity to explore its power. Once comprehended and brought into practice, this feature can support highly efficient and useful workflows.
This is my first blog post at blogs.adobe.com, so an introduction is probably in order. My name is Ankur Jain, and I'm the new Product Manager for Adobe RoboHelp. I look forward to working with you, and discussing things related to RoboHelp and technical communication in general.
I hope you are enjoying RoboHelp 8. Please do share your feedback.
FrameMaker-RoboHelp Integration in TCS revamped!! Myth or Truth?
FrameMaker and RoboHelp Integration was first introduced in TCS 1 in order to enable online publishing workflows for FrameMaker authors. In TCS 1 a user could maintain a live link of a FrameMaker document in RoboHelp and convert it to HTML topic(s) to be published in various output formats like WebHelp, AirHelp etc. In TCS 1 an initial version of this feature was released which included basic workflows for achieving this objective.
After the feature gained popularity and we received users' feedback, this feature has been entirely revamped in TCS 2 to support a wider range of workflows around this feature and to make this feature more flexible and user friendly.
This blog covers the major highlights of newly introduced features in this area.
New Easy to Use User Interface
TCS 2 provides an entirely new User Interface to specify FM documents to RoboHelp topics conversion settings. This UI is easy to use and allows for a central control of all the settings related to this feature.
The Conversion Settings dialog can be invoked in RoboHelp as follows
Go to File‐> Project Setting
Click on "Import" tab
Click on "Edit" button for Conversion settings of FrameMaker documents
New Efficient Workflow
Now, users can separate the tasks of linking FM documents in a RoboHelp project and specifying conversion settings. In other words, now it is possible to link a FM document in RoboHelp without converting it to topics and mention the conversion settings later on.
Sharing settings across projects
All the conversion settings can be shared across projects by using the Export/Import settings feature. So, settings once done in one RoboHelp project can be exported to a settings file. This settings file can then be imported to another project without needing to do all the settings from scratch.
Style Mapping Workflows
TCS allows mapping of FrameMaker styles with new styles in RoboHelp during conversion through several new workflows. It is no more a pain point for FrameMaker users who are not conversant with RoboHelp CSS styles. For FM Users: FM Template Workflow: Users can define their styles for mapping in a FrameMaker template and specify the template in RoboHelp. This template is applied on all the linked FM documents in RoboHelp before their conversion to RoboHelp topics. Import CSS Workflow: Users can also choose to import a pre‐created CSS into their project for style mapping. For RH Users: CSS Workflow: Users, who are conversant with CSS styles, can design their own styles in RoboHelp and then map individual FrameMaker styles with RoboHelp CSS styles.
Mapping of Table Styles
FrameMaker table styles can now be replaced with RoboHelp Table styles in one go thus modifying the entire look and feel of tables in the document.
FrameMaker Autonumber to RoboHelp List Conversion
Now, RoboHelp is powered to support complex and hierarchical list styles. TCS now allows for easy conversion of FrameMaker autonumbers to RoboHelp Lists while maintaining the list formatting and definitions.
Support for Markers Markers present in FrameMaker documents are now preserved in RoboHelp XHTML topics in the form of PIs (Processing Instructions). These PIs can be exploited to implement lot of functionalities around them through scripting. Please refer my recent blog post "Scripting in TCS unleashed" for such an example.
Image Settings
RoboHelp now provides various image related settings (e.g. Image dimensions margins, format, quality etc.). These settings are applied to the images generated through conversion of anchored frames present in FM documents.
Pagination Settings
There are two workflows available for TCS users to paginate their large FM documents to smaller RoboHelp topics. Based on FM Styles: Users can now specify FM styles (e.g. Heading1, Heading2) for pagination. Based on Marker: Users can also specify a marker in FM document based on which pagination can be done in RoboHelp.
Support for DHTML Styles
Users can now specify text in FrameMaker itself on which DHTML effects are to be applied. FrameMaker in TCS has a new menu item named "Adobe RoboHelp" which allows for applying these effects. Once, these effects are applied in FrameMaker, the corresponding text in RoboHelp Topics has the particular DHTML effect applied to it after conversion.
There is a long list of enhancements done in this area. Please refer TCS help and keep visiting this blog to explore further and deeper into various TCS features.
Yesterday, I went to a music concert and after the concert I decided to talk to the guitarist who had nearly taken a control over my senses. This person has been playing guitar for past many years. During the conversation, he revealed that initially he used to play inexpensive guitars as he didn't consider himself as an expert and secondly he was afraid that his parents would scold him if he damages the sophisticated ones. This continued for many years but he was still an unknown name in the field of fame.
But within a few years he realized that it was a must to play a sophisticated tool for carving his own niche in the path of success. He had to move beyond the basics. Though there was some amount of training required but the right selection of the tool was also very critical in the path of success.
Similarly, for a few pages document, a letter or a memo, it's common to work with tools like Microsoft Word but then as soon as we talk about technical communication, there is an expectation of being more professional, sophisticated, robust and organized.
You folks already know about the robust structured document support in FrameMaker. This could be native structured, XML or specific XML standard based like DITA. FrameMaker 9 Hierarchical books provide great flexibility in aggregating legacy content with the newly created documents and ...
I think I should stop here otherwise I'll start giving you tips and tricks on migrating content to structured FrameMaker. Well, I said that I will stop here but you should definitely do a deep dive into it by attending the upcoming seminar by RJ Jacquez on Migrating to and Benefiting from Structured Authoring using Adobe FrameMaker 9
Details for this 90 minute live eSeminar are available at
One of the most powerful features of FrameMaker Integration is the power to separately define a Topic name and the File name for pagination (breaking of Documents into smaller HTML topics)
We all know that by using any Custom marker, we can paginate (break) a document into multiple topic by specifying the marker name in the above shown field in Others Setting TAB on the conversion settings dialog
This marker can be used for two more things
1. It can be used to specify the Title on the topic thus created
2. It can be used to specify Name of the corresponding HTML file thus created (name of the physical file)
How to Use it:-
To specify the Title we have to write a Pipe Symbol ‘|’ and the Title after it in the Marker text of the Marker used for pagination
* To specify any specific File name for the HTML generated, we have to write the Filename (just the name not the extension) in the Marker Text
* To specify both Title and File name we write "File name | Title" in the marker text
For elaboration of Topic Name Marker, see section “Topic Name Marker” on Topic “Integrating with Adobe Technical Communication Suite / Importing FrameMaker documents into RoboHelp/ Pagination for Help” in the Help
Creating Sub-Index directly from FrameMaker
Everyone of us know how do we get the Index marked (using Index marker in document) into RoboHelp but very few of us must be having idea of the power of RoboHelp to get even a Sub-Index from FrameMaker documents
How to Use it:-
We take an example that we want to create Sub-Index for ‘Variable’ say ‘How to create Variable’, ‘How to Modify Variable’ and ‘How to Delete Variable’
So first to create the Index for Variable we go to that part where Variable is referred place an Index marker and type marker text as “Variable”
Secondly we go to the part of document where its creation is described and place an Index marker and type marker text as “Variable: How to create Variable”
Then we go to the part of document where its modification is described and place an Index marker and type marker text as “Variable: How to Modify Variable”
Then we go to the part of document where its deletion is described and place an Index marker and type marker text as “Variable: How to Delete Variable”
So when we Import/Link this FrameMaker document into RoboHelp and Mark the Index for conversion we get these Sub-Index items too and hence we will have one more level of editing power at FrameMaker end.
Improving the referenced Images (without call outs)
Most of the times we face the issue that the image that was referenced in the FrameMaker documents and which even do not have any call outs (text in a box or a line on the image inserted using “Graphics->Tools”) are not generated properly in the RoboHelp.
For such scenarios we can just specify ‘Width’ and ‘Height’ in Preferred Dimensions of Image in the Conversion Setting dialog to zero as shown below
[Enhanced Anchored Frame Conversion in FM Linking]
Scripting in TCS
The feature of Scripting in RoboHelp can be leveraged in TCS to extend
the feature of conversion of FrameMaker documents to RoboHelp XHTML topics
(FrameMaker Linking). TCS users need certain tweaks in FM Linking and
Import feature to suit the feature as per their requirements. Some of
these tweaks can be achieved through Scripting. This blog talks about
one such tweak and explains how one can write a script to achieve this.
Enhanced Anchored Frame Conversion
through Scripting
During update of a linked FrameMaker document in RoboHelp, an anchored
frame present in the document is converted to a web supported image in
RoboHelp XHTML topic. The properties of anchored frames are also converted
to image settings (image size, image border etc.) in XHMLT topics. However,
at times, a user may need to tweak these settings for individual images.
Or a user may not be satisfied with the quality of image generated in
RoboHelp and may wish to replace it with a processed image.
We can achieve all of this through a simple script. Here is how we can
write and use such a script maintaining the Single Sourcing route.
We can observe that the problem involves two steps.
1. Mention the image settings for each anchored
frame
We can achieve this by inserting a marker in the FrameMaker document
before each anchored frame to which settings are to be applied. Let us
define a new marker type say “Graphic” for this purpose.
Insert this marker before the anchored frame. Consider two image settings
as of now viz. image replacement and image resizing.
resize=150 means zoom in the image size to 150% while inserting in XHTML
topic.
replace=true means whenever this marker is found in the document,
replace the image with a new image of the same name placed in a specified
images folder.
(Non-programmers may skip this section further and jump to the next section to start using the script)
2. Process and apply those settings to the
corresponding image
Run a script to process the marker to understand the individual
image settings mentioned above and modify the image tag in XHTML topic
in RoboHelp accordingly.
This script shall be executed once the RoboHelp topic has been generated
from RoboHelp User Interface. This script shall patch the image
tags of the topic with the help of following steps.
a. Start reading the HTML of the topic in the form of a token
list. Here is an example of an HTML token list <html> <head>
<title> </title> </head> etc.
b. Look for marker (basically XHTML PI) in the topic. The marker in
HTML looks like this <?rh_marker name="Graphic" text="resize=150,replace=true"?>
c. Obtain the maker name and text and check if its name matches with
our “Graphic” marker.
var tknmgr = RoboHelp.getTokenManager(filepath);
if (tknmgr != null)
{
var bResize = false;
var bReplace = false;
for(index=1;index<=tknmgr.count;index++)
{
var token = tknmgr.item(index);
var strName = token.name;
//Looking for marker PI
if ((token.tokenType == tokenPI_Identifier) && (strName.indexOf(markerToken) != -1))
{
// Extract the string with attribute name
strMarkerName = strName.substring(strName.indexOf("name=")+6, strName.indexOf("text")-2);
// extract the string with attribute text
strMarkerText = strName.substring(strName.indexOf("text=")+6, strName.indexOf("?>")-1);
// if the marker is of type graphicsStyle
if (strMarkerName = graphicMarker)
{
//Process marker
}
}
}
}
d. Find marker attributes “resize” and “replace”
var strResizePercent = FindMarkerTextAttributeValue(strMarkerText, "resize");
// see if the processing instructions contains resize
if (strResizePercent != "")
{
nResizePercent = parseFloat(strResizePercent);
bResize = true;
}
var strReplace = FindMarkerTextAttributeValue(strMarkerText, "replace");
// see if the processing instructions contains replace
if(strReplace == "true")
bReplace = true;
e. Look for image <img> tag. When found, do resizing and image
replacement stuff.
For resizing, read the current width and height and calculate the new
width and height as per the percentage mentioned in the marker text. For
replacing the image, update the “src” attribute of the img tag with the
new image path. New image path can be obtained by the image folder path
mentioned in the script and the current image name.
if(token.tokenType == RoboHelp.TokenType.TOKENTAG && token.tagType == RoboHelp.TagType.TAGIMAGE)
{
// Do resizing and replacing stuff
}
f. Save the topic.
g. Repeat this for all the topics in the project.
The Complete Functional Script
Please download the attached script file for the entire functional script. The
script has the following variables which should be updated by the user
before using the script.
var imagePath = "/Images"; //Image folder path relative to the project folder
var graphicMarker = "Graphic"; //FM marker type
Further Enhancements to the script
This script can be further enhanced to include other image settings
like image margin, image border etc. for each image.
The script can be changed to not to replace the RoboHelp generated
images and do some post processing of generated images using Adobe
Photoshop.
Several other TCS functionalities may be designed using scripting.
Explore the power of scripting and extend TCS features.
Here is a good chance for people in Australia to check out the new features of RoboHelp 8 and TCS 2. If you are in Melbourne during 20th to 22nd May, visit the 12th Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference 2009 at the Savoy Vibe Hotel. Tony Self and Matthew Ellison will be presenting the key features of RoboHelp, Captivate and the Technical Communication Suite.
The capabilities they will cover include
1) AIR Help as the new output format
2) FM to RH import for online output
3) Enhanced review workflows in TCS for authoring collaboration
4) FrameMaker live link support in RoboHelp
If you are unable to visit the conference and still have some questions on RoboHelp or TCS 2.0, you can reach out to me or Mahesh Kumar Gupta. I am available at "dhirenj at adobe dot com", while Mahesh can be reached at "mahesh at adobe dot com"
By default RoboHelp Server 8 gets installed with MS Access as the database which is suitable for internal use or in a development environment.
But for production environment, users should use Microsoft SQL Server/Oracle/SQL Server Express.
Steps to configure oracle/sql server as database –
1) Launch the Config Manager and select File > Open Context and select the context for which you want to configure the database.
2) Select radio button "Oracle 9i or higher/Microsoft SQL Server/SQL Server Express Edition".
3) Create a system DSN using ODBC administrator. To do so, click on the “ODBC Admin” button. This will launch the “ODBC Data Source Administrator”. Click on the “System DSN” tab and then click on “Add” button and select the driver type depending on the kind of database your are using. Then give the Database server details and the user name and password to connect to the database. Press OK.
4) Now select this newly created DSN from the “Select DSN” drop down.
5) In the username, password fields, specify the username and password used to create the DSN.
6) Click “Save”.
7) You can verify if RoboHelp Server has all the information to connect to the database by clicking “Test Connection”. If connection details are OK, it should show a dialog box saying “Successfully connected to database”.
Master Pages, a new concept introduced in Adobe RoboHelp 8, intends to provide flexibility in controlling the layout of topics, where in an author may separate the actual content from the layout of the output and may do it from a single place. In Adobe RoboHelp 8, a user may use Master Page as a Layout and Styling canvas where one may put basic HTML elements to be used for Layout purposes. This is an enhanced feature to the legacy Topic Template feature in RoboHelp through which user could just create topics having initial similar content and could control CSS style and Header/Footer.
Also, this feature introduces the concept of various Placeholders viz. Body Placeholder, MiniTOC Placeholder, Breadcrumbs Placeholder, where a user may generate variety of content in different style as and when required at various places in the topics controlling them from the same Master Page.
Using other placeholders, such as Mini TOC and Breadcrumbs may give authors a tighter control over the layout of the output since Mini TOC or Breadcrumbs may be generated automatically with same settings done at a single place in the Master Page. RoboHelp Headers and Footers behaviour is kept similar to earlier Topic Templates for a reusable persistence model.
Another use of this feature may be to achieve different look and feel for different SSL outputs. With a Layout already defined in a Master page, during generation of output, user may decide to apply one of the Master Pages used in the project so as to keep a consistent look and feel throughout the project output. This gives more flexibility to a user with respect to defining and controlling the layout of output.
The Master Page
Different areas of a Default Master Page
The Master Page Editor may be considered having two components, first, the Body placeholder area as a representative of Topic content to which this Master Page will be applied and second, the area outside the Body Placeholder which may be used for controlling the layout of associated topics (Refer the Image)
This Layout area is like any other Editor area where HTML content may be placed. The difference with the content outside Body Placeholder i.e. the Layout area is that these contents are not shown in the associated topic but are patched during preview/output. RoboHelp 8 overrides all layout settings (e.g. Borders and Shading Properties, Background Color etc) of attached Topic from that of the Master page.
In the Design view of a Topic associated with a Master Page, contents from the layout part is not shown, but while creating a topic, content present inside the Body Placeholder is placed as initial content of the new topic. The resulting preview/output of a topic with applied Master Page is formed with a combination of Layout from Master Page and content from the topic placed at a position where Body Placeholder is kept in the Master Page Layout. This may be understood from the following schematic:
Generation of Preview/Output for a topic associated with a Master Page
The Placeholders
Body Placeholder
A new concept of Body placeholder has been introduced in the Master Page which shall act as a placeholder for the actual topic content associated with this master page. This Body Placeholder is a special placeholder that provides space to embed the seed content to be inserted into a newly created topic based on this Master Page. Another most important use of this placeholder is to represent the Topic Content in layout of the Master Page. A Master Page can have only one Body Placeholder at a time. During preview/generation of resultant topic based on a Master Page, Body placeholder of the corresponding master page will be replaced by content of the actual topic content and the resulting topic will be generated.
Mini TOC Placeholder:
This placeholder may be used to generate a Mini TOC automatically at compile time for intra topic navigation. Although, this Placeholder may be inserted anywhere and any no. of times in the Master Page or a Topic, the purpose of centralized control and consistent appearance may be achieved by placing it into a Master Page Layout area. While previewing or in the output of a topic, this Placeholder will be replaced by the actual Mini TOC generated based on the Style settings done for the placeholder and the content in the resulting Topic for style H1 to H6 .
Mini TOC also provides a way to expand/collapse the Mini TOC in the output with a defined string (By default it is show/hide), which is shown beside Mini TOC caption in Expanding Hot Spot Style. The string may be changed from LNG File of the project wherein the variables are present in Master Page’s section. If an author doesn’t want to have any text present for the expand/collapse functionality, he may keep the variables as blank. Also if one wants to keep the Caption and this Hot Spot absent for a Mini TOC, one may keep the Caption blank. Still further, if a user wants to use the Expand/Collapse string in the output but doesn’t want to have any Caption in the resulting Mini TOC, he may achieve it by placing a space in the Caption field of the corresponding placeholder.
Breadcrumbs Placeholder
Breadcrumbs Placeholder is a placeholder for a Breadcrumb to be generated at Output generation time for inter topic linking based on the TOC selected. This placeholder may be inserted anywhere and any no. of times in a Master Page or a Topic, although maximum flexibility and centralized control may be achieved if used in a Master Page layout area.
Style for breadcrumbs may be set from the Options dialog itself, but if a user wants to use style present in CSS he may set the style for Breadcrumbs in CSS itself, where an entry for the Breadcrumbs character and paragraph style is present. After setting these style elements in the CSS user should check “Use Style from Topic” option in the corresponding Breadcrumb dialog for those settings to be applied in corresponding Breadcrumbs.
Generating consistent Output in RoboHelp 8
Adobe RoboHelp 8 provides a consistent way of producing output with the help of applying CSS or Master Page while generating output. This gives an author flexibility to generate same content with different styles and different layouts by just applying a CSS or a Master Page while generating output.
If a user wants to have a consistent layout across his output, he may create a Master Page with that particular layout and apply it in all of the topics in the content. The resulting output will have all topic contents placed in place of Body Placeholder present in the Master Page with the CSS of Master Page overriding the CSS of topics across output Topics. User may also select only a CSS to apply across all topics by selecting it in the SSL dialog. Doing this, selected CSS will be applied across all topics while generation.
A user may still want to use a layout from a Master Page and the CSS from the Topic itself. This may also be achieved by applying a Master Page having None CSS attached and corresponding layout present. Doing this will apply only layout from the Master Page on the resulting topics and CSS of the topics will be the same as in topics and hence may be different for the topics in the output.
Adobe RoboHelp 8 comes with a new layout for Help output i.e. Adobe AIR layout. One of its types is Adobe AIR Application which is a cross platform Help system with an embedded browser that can be deployed on a desktop or can use the online content to be viewed in AIR Viewer. This is a single deliverable help system like a CHM file that requires prior installation of AIR runtime. It hosts a range of new features and significant number of advantages over other help systems.
Some worth a mention are:
It lays greater emphasis on Security as publisher needs to sign the help system digitally at the time of the generation.
End User Feedback is something that is always valued and required to develop an efficient and more useful help system. Now, this capability is integrated in the Air Help System which enables receiving of comments and incorporating them to augment the effectiveness of Help system. Users can provide their feedback on help systems by adding comments for the topics present and utilize various Commenting options. One such option is Syncing of Comments that allows multiple users to see each others’ comments that are always updated to most recent using a server.
For completing the review workflow so that feedback gets transformed into updated help system that can be uploaded automatically, Auto Update feature has been introduced where in user gets to know about the latest updated version for a help system and can update to newer version instantly. All the users who are online and have older version of a help system, receive notifications for the update.
Like other browsers, Adobe AIR Help application provides users with an option to keep their Favorite links at one place. Also, RSS Feeds, that has become so popular now days, can also be added to the Favorites section. It includes an inbuilt RSS reader which provides many user friendly options for organizing the feeds.
Air Help application comes with the flexibility of seamless interaction between Online and Offline mode. As soon as user goes offline due to a connection problem, help system gets directed to offline help.
Adobe AIR help application comes with a variety of flashy templates and skins. An author can decide among templates and color themes as per his flavor.
With the release of RoboHelp 8, we have added and enhanced several capabilities of RoboHelp. These include
* Enhanced Editing and Layout Capabilities
* Scalable Single Sourcing
* Automation with Built-in Scripting
and many more.
With RoboHelp Server 8 we have also made several improvements over RoboHelp Server 7.
And of course, the Technical Communication Suite 2 allows you to use the great features of so many more products.
Now we would like to meet you and get your feedback on these new releases and how they help in your workplace.
The annual WritersUA Conference is happening in Seattle, WA between March 29 and 1 April 2009. I will be attending the conference, and will be present along with other Adobe staff at the Adobe presentation booth.
If you would like to setup a meeting time with me, please drop me a line at dhirenj at adobe dot com
Alternatively, walk up to the booth and ask for me. It will be a pleasure to hear from you.
Adobe RoboHelp Server 8 is completely rewritten in Java and is much more stable and robust than previous versions. Installation is very simplified now.
One major difference from earlier versions is now RoboHelp Server 8 does not need IIS Server. Instead it uses Tomcat server.
Steps to install Tomcat :
0) Make sure JRE is installed.
1) Double click the Windows Service Installer to start the installation process.
2) In the “Choose Components” window, leave the “Type of install” as default option which is “Normal”.
3) Click next and select destination path for Tomcat.
4) Click next and specify the Tomcat Port. The default value is 8080. If you have some other process running on this port like IIS or something else, then you can change this port value to any other value like 8181 etc.
5) Default user name is provided as admin. You can use the same.
6) Click next and the Tomcat installer will automatically detect the JRE path for you. If you want you can change this value.
7) Click on install and then installation process will begin.
8) After installation is complete, Tomcat service will be started. A tomcat icon will be created in your taskbar.
9) Verify that tomcat is up and running by opening the page “http://localhost:’ in browser.
This should open the Tomcat Home Page if your tomcat is successfully running.
10) If you are unable to see the tomcat home page, see the tomcat log which are located at /logs.
How to start/stop Tomcat Service:
There are a number of ways in which you can start/stop tomcat service -
1) Double click the tomcat icon in the taskbar and that will launch the Tomcat Properties dialog and using that Tomcat service can be started/stopped.
2) In the Run prompt, enter services.msc. That will launch the Windows Service dialog. From the Windows services dialog box, you can start, stop, or restart Tomcat 6.0 service
3) Open the /bin folder and double-click tomcat6w.exe to launch Tomcat Configuration dialog box. You can start, stop, or restart from this dialog box.
Basic steps to install RoboHelp Server 8:
1) Install JRE and Tomcat.
2) Verify tomcat is up and running by visiting URL : http://localhost:
3) Launch setup.exe of RoboHelp Server 8
4) Just proceed through the installed, accept the license agreement and choose the destination path for RoboHelp Server 8 installation.
5) RoboHelp Server 8 should get installed.
6) Now open RoboHelp Server web admin URLl in browser: http://localhost:/robohelp/admin
7) Web Admin login page should get opened up.
8) Use default user name “admin” and password ”admin” to log in.
9) RoboHelp Server 8 web admin should get launched.
Tomcat can be configured to run with Apache or Microsoft IIS web servers. Details can be found in Getting Started Guide and Help documentation.
Adobe RoboHelp 8 has several exciting new features. First and foremost, Adobe RoboHelp 8 is now an XHTML Authoring Tool – that means, there is clean XHTML code editing in an visual environment. In addition, you can validate the code to assure World Wide Web Consortium compliance.
You can see the list of other new features below. To learn more, please click on the reviewer’s guide below. Reviewer’s guide also has several Captivate demos which illustrate some of these features. You may need to download the PDF to view these demos. You can also download the try it exercises.
Publishing Features – special enhancements for the end-user
Enhanced support for Adobe AIR – Adobe AIR™ technology provides a revolutionary new help application that provides many new ways for users to find information, add and share comments, in a system that is always up to date. It combines the best of the Web as well as the desktop, whether the user is online or not. Authors can generate this exciting new Adobe AIR help application and package it for easy deployment and management of automatic updates.
Powerful Search engine – Search results are ranked by relevance with the initial text of the topic for context, search highlighting, a synonym editor and a brand new Keyword Search that can be defined to help the user find what they are looking for. Also added is a way to define search Phrases as well as Substrings. Another major feature is that text in Adobe PDF and MS Office documents can be searched.
Enhanced Printed Documentation options – More flexibility in mapping your online output styles to the printed version in Microsoft® Word or Adobe PDF.
Breadcrumbs / Mini TOC – Breadcrumb navigation and/or a Mini TOC can be added with placeholders on a topic basis or with Master Pages. If preferred, breadcrumbs can be added globally with a single checkmark when generating output.
Improved Glossary – Glossary definitions which are edited are automatically updated in glossary hotspot links.
Merged Help implementation – Merged project enhancements provide a visually intuitive way to merge child projects which become part of a master TOC.
Twisties – Twisties provide both expanded and dropdown hotspots and can now have configurable images which provide a visual cue to the user.
More author-friendly enhancements
A new Styles and Formatting pod - Quickly apply, create or edit CSS styles.
World class Table, List and Autonumbering - Table designs (with many new prepared templates) can now be created or modified in the Styles editor using a graphical preview and exposed formatting tools. List support now includes enhanced handling of standard HTML Lists, MultiLevel lists and customizable autonumbering.
Easier import of MS® Word and Adobe FrameMaker files - Define common Import and Conversion Settings for consistent use of CSS and Style Mapping across all projects.
Linking MS® Word files -By linking to MS® Word files you can keep your content updated to the original source MS® Word document without re-importing each time.
Import DITA - Topic-based content into a RoboHelp HTML project. This allows the DITA author to take advantage of RoboHelp software’s rich feature set of TOC, Index, Glossary and advanced publishing options.
Enhanced Unicode and Language Support - There is now Unicode and language support at the topic and paragraph level.
FLV format now supported - For compelling eLearning and video presentations.
IFrame support - Include an external HTML or PDF inside a topic.
Single Sourcing Features - write once, distribute to many audiences
Brand new CSS Editor - Provides a graphical way to define Table Styles, and complex List Styles.
Master Pages (formerly Templates) - Help separate layout and styling from content. There are new placeholders for breadcrumbs and a “mini” Table of Contents and the Body section of each topic.
Resource Manager - Allows you to manage and reuse assets (including Images, Topics, Stylesheets, Multimedia and Snippets) across multiple Robohelp projects.
Formatted User-defined Variables (UDV) - Provide a robust way to make global changes to common blocks of content throughout many topics. A major new enhancement is the addition of formatting and the inclusion of such things as images and links which are easily created in a Design and HTML editor.
Productivity Features - Work quicker, smarter, more efficiently
Scripting - Automate with built-in scripts or create your own. The entire Adobe Extended Scripting Toolkit CS4 is included with Adobe RoboHelp 8, including many ready-made scripts to get you started.
Integration with other Adobe applications - Adobe Captivate 4, RoboScreenCapture and RoboSource Control are separate applications that are integrated into the Adobe RoboHelp 8 interface.
Custom To Do List - This popular RoboHelp favorite now allows you to edit the supplied tasks and add your own items depending on your own workflows.
Usability Features - making the work environment easier
Project Manager Enhancements - RoboHelp software’s strength has been its ability to help the author keep track of the many assets in a given project. Now, you can drag and drop topics and folders to create the same hierarchy used in the TOC. There is a choice to customize the list of files shown or switch to the traditional view with its virtual folders.
UI Enhancements - Color-coding to show pods with focus, easy close of topics in Design Editor, more tooltips on Navigation buttons and more robust right-click Context Menu support are some of the user-friendly changes to the interface.
Option to install RoboHelp for Word - You can now choose whether or not to install this application and create desktop icons. according to your preference.
Custom File Type mapping dialog - In addition to choosing your preferred HTML editor, there is an enhanced dialog to associate file extensions with your choice of applications.
More functionality added to existing features- Snippets can now be added to Popups and Drop-down hotspots and DHTML effects in non-IE browsers. Because of improved HHActiveX support, Glossaries and Browse Sequences can be included in the HTML Help (.chm) format in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) multibyte languages. Improvements have been also been made to Multiple TOC, Index and Glossary editing (including the ability to update Glossary definitions automatically.)
· Auto Update - Adobe AIR applications that can update themselves when online connection is available and that can work perfectly when desktop is offline. For example, Adobe AIR help file created with RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR will prompt the end-users when an update is available. With a single click, the help file will update itself. · Web 2.0 Commenting and Review - Adobe AIR applications can store information locally – for example, when you add comments to Online Help, they are stored locally and can be viewed after you have closed the application. End users can also comment on external pages and store the comments as part of help file. Comments are still available when Online Help has been updated (provided file names don’t change) or when you are offline. · Extensibility - Unlike HTML Help which depends on the CHM viewer, the functionality of the Adobe AIR is extensible and customizable. For example, organizations can add branding information to Adobe AIR help file, including icons for help file, branding imagery on the top of the help file and so on. · Multiple tab – never before end user experience - Adobe AIR help file also allows you to open multiple tabs within the tri-pane enabling multiple help topics and threads to be navigated at the same time. · Integrated interface to everything your end users need - You can also add resource links to your help files – enabling a single access point for product pages, user forums, knowledge base, online help and external web pages. · Multiple templates to choose from - Organizations get to chose from several of the templates and can select a particular skin or theme for each of these templates. With RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, there are three templates come out of the box - Multi-Tab Accordion, Unipane and Classic Help. · End user preferences - RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR enables the help users to customize their help by selecting their preferences (something they can’t do for a CHM or for WebHelp output – which is not hosted on a Server). · Cross Platform - Adobe AIR is cross-platform and cross-browser, supported on Windows, Mac and Linux (currently in pre-release).
For more information on RoboHelp Packager, you can see following posts on this blog -
Adobe AIR runtime enables applications to deliver both the benefits of server connectivity and the compelling end user experience of a desktop application. With a seamless offline- online experience, end-users of Adobe AIR applications can continue to work when they are temporarily offline.
Neither of the popular help output options - CHM or WebHelp or WebHelp on a Server provide the array of features as Adobe AIR does today. That said, in my opinion, RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR is a beginning, beginning of a new revolution in help authoring. Here is a list of what you get today-
Adobe AIR applications that can update themselves when online connection is available and that can work perfectly when desktop is offline. For example, Adobe AIR help file created with RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR will prompt the end-users when an update is available. With a single click, the help file will update itself.
Adobe AIR applications can store information locally – for example, when you add comments to Online Help, they are stored locally and can be viewed after you have closed the application. End users can also comment on external pages and store the comments as part of help file. Comments are still available when Online Help has been updated (provided file names don’t change) or when you are offline.
Unlike HTML Help which depends on the CHM viewer, the functionality of the Adobe AIR is extensible and customizable. For example, organizations can add branding information to Adobe AIR help file, including icons for help file, branding imagery on the top of the help file and so on.
Adobe AIR help file also allows you to open multiple tabs within the tri-pane enabling multiple help topics and threads to be navigated at the same time.
You can also add resource links to your help files – enabling a single access point for product pages, user forums, knowledge base, online help and external web pages.
Organizations get to chose from several of the templates and can select a particular skin or theme for each of these templates. With RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, there are three templates come out of the box - Multi-Tab Accordion, Unipane and Classic Help.
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR enables the help users to customize their help by selecting their preferences (something they can’t do for a CHM or for WebHelp output – which is not hosted on a Server).
Adobe AIR is cross-platform and cross-browser, supported on Windows, Mac and Linux (currently in pre-release).
Needless to say, Adobe AIR has attracted a lot of interest among the help community and some of the experts believe that within two years, Adobe AIR will be the preferred help format for 40% of all help authors. The only debating point is whether Adobe AIR will mainly replace CHM/HTML Help, or if it will take share away from WebHelp as well.
Last year at STC, we heard several requests for enabling an easy migration from MadCap Flare to Adobe RoboHelp . Same was true for this year's conference - just the number of requests increased manifold. We had several customers visit us at Adobe booth and request for a migration. Some of the reasons for migration were -
"I started using Flare under the impression that RoboHelp is dead, now that Adobe has released a new version I want to come back to RoboHelp",
"I am the lone writer using Flare, other writers in my team are using Adobe TechCommSuite, I need to convert my Flare project to RoboHelp"
"RoboHelp is so easy to use........... Give me one reason to move to RoboHelp, I want to come back"
"I love Adobe AIR, can I publishing to Adobe AIR using RoboHelp 7 - if I could just import my Flare project in RoboHelp"
"I want end user commenting in my Online Help"
Now you have help available with migrating your MadCap Flare projects to Adobe RoboHelp. John Daigle, RoboHelp expert and consultant, is offering a free converter to migrate your projects from Flare to RoboHelp. The converter is a free download from John Daigle's site and source code is also available under Common Public License. He already has a few success stories and if response in the STC conference is anything to go by, he is going to be very busy.
Recently, Gryphon Mountain Journalhad a blog post on Web 2.0 in online help and why software vendors have not enabled this so far. Clearly, we need to make more people aware about Adobe AIR and the promise it brings to Online Help. As a follow up to my comment, Ben had a few interesting questions about RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and since they are general enough for everyone’s interest, I am answering them here –
1. When will CSH be included?
Context sensitive help is already included. If you install RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and press F1, you will see help in Adobe AIR and it is context sensitive. More information is available as part of the documentation that ship with RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR.
2a. From what I've read, it's not clear to me whether the AIR-packaged help is installed on or saved to a user's hard drive. The description of the auto-update feature talks about going out to a central location and getting updates.
Adobe AIR generates a single file which can be installed on end users machine. RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR installs its own Adobe AIR help file as you install the application. If you uninstall RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, it uninstall's the Adobe AIR help file. If you are embedding your help with your software application, you can make the installation transparent to the end-user. This may require some installer work in integrating Adobe AIR file with your application.
Help on the end user machines is automatically notified of the updates and end users don’t need to go to the Server location, the update is seamless – at the click of a button. Adobe AIR makes the process of update seamless. Now, help can be independently updated and does not require a patch for your software application.
2b. What happens if your help system goes with a Web application and doesn't need to be installed on users' machines like a CHM is? Is it enough to have the AIR help file stored on a server only? Could the version on the server be configured to access a computer for updates?
Adobe AIR is a new help format under constant development. I agree that existing version of RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR is much closer to CHM in terms of output it generates. I expect RoboHelp to enable you to replace both CHM and WebHelp with Adobe AIR in the future.
4. In order to share comments, do reviewers have to email them? Are comments not saved as part of the AIR help so that I could open up my production help system and see people's comments?
Comments are saved as part of Adobe AIR file and can be exported to XML file as well. At present, there are two workflows supported for comments. One, an e-mail based review and commenting workflow. As a first step, the author sends the Adobe AIR file to reviewers by e-mail. Reviewers can add comments and export the comments to a local file and send it back to the author (by e-mail). Author can aggregate the comments in a single Adobe AIR file and manage them (sort, view by topic/reviewer, delete).
The second workflow is a shared folder based workflow in which the Adobe AIR file is shared over the network in a folder. Once all reviewers have installed the Adobe AIR help, they can review and add comments. This is a synchronous review and commenting workflow compared to adhoc and asynchronous e-mail based commenting and review workflow. A reviewer can synchronize the comments and see the comments of other reviewers at any point in time and hence it helps save time for reviewers and also enable collaboration during the review process. The review initiator can also synchronize the comments and get the latest copy of the comments at any point in time.
To add to above description on the review workflow, the commenting feature is designed to help an end customer personalize Help by adding comments on the same. These comments will not be uploaded to the server, however can be exported to a file and shared with friends over email.
If you are authoring a help system, a knowledge base or a set of policies in RoboHelp, you probably need to send the RoboHelp project for review to your development team, project managers, client, product managers, consultants or colleagues. A RoboHelp project comprises of multiple topics, with images, multimedia and contains TOC, Index and Glossary. Sharing individual HTML files over e-mail and keeping track of them has been a challenge. At present, there are two options available for sharing your RoboHelp project with reviewers. RoboSourceControl allows collaboration on the source files (closely integrated with RoboHelp) and PDF enables a seamless commenting workflow inside and outside the organization. RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR now provides a new alternative for your review and commenting workflow's - Adobe AIR.
With RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, you can package the complete project in a single distributable file - including TOC, Index and Glossary along with content files. Unlike RoboSourceControl, reviewers don't need RoboHelp to review the content and unlike PDF, the help files maintain the same look and feel in Adobe AIR.
A major challenge in the review process has been sharing the content with multiple reviewers, collecting feedback in a synchronous manner and managing the comments from multiple reviewers. With PDF and Adobe AIR, you can send a single file to your reviewers and receive comments in a XML file. The comments from multiple reviewers received in an e-mail can be imported in PDF or Adobe AIR. Similar to PDF, RoboHelp generated Adobe AIR help file can be shared on a network and multiple reviewers can simultaneously review the content. The review can be synchronous, that is, reviewers can send and receive comments, and collaborate with other reviewers in real time on click of a button.
The technical author can also view and manage (sort, delete, add) the comments from multiple reviewers in a single file. Both PDF and Adobe AIR help file allow authors to view comments by topic or by reviewers.
One of the novel features in
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR- Beta 2 is an ability to set end user preferences for help. RoboHelp help templates in Adobe AIR have been designed keeping in view the end customer. For the first time, authors can now enable end users to customize their help systems.
End users can choose to show or hide mini Table of Contents and breadcrumbs, if they want more space for content pane and TOC.
Also, if end users want to open help topics in multiple tabs they can enable that. Multiple tabs allow end users to navigate to multiple topics at the same time.
End users can also specify their preferences for Auto-Update and also, manually check for updates.
In addition, comment settings allow end-users to specify a default login name for identification of comments.
End users can also delete all comments from preferences dialog.
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR- Beta is now updated. You can download the new version from Adobe Labs. It has added a long list of novel features - first time for a HATT. Now, besides multiple tabs, favorites, commenting and multiple skins like Multi-Tab Accordion and Uni-pane Help, you have another set of new features.
Designed for End Customers - Adobe AIR based Help templates have been designed keeping in view the end customer. They have some high-end navigation features like Mini TOC, Breadcrumbs, etc. Apart from these capabilities, the new Adobe AIR based Help also empowers the end customers to customize the Help. An end customer can set their own preferences and customize Help as desired.
Compelling Rich Branded Experience - RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR provides a compelling rich user experience. It includes templates that help authors package the same content into three completely different styles – Multi-Tab Accordion, Uni-Pane or the Classic Tri-Pane Help. Apart from this it also helps the Authors brand the Help as per Corporate Branding Guidelines. It provides support for the addition of a Company Logo and a Punch line in the main Help window. Apart from this it also provides an About Box in the Help that details the version, description, copyrights, logos etc.
Auto Update - Adobe AIR based Help applications provide an Auto Update feature using which updates can be pushed to all installed connected versions of Help. Usually, the Help content bundled with the application is never updated, while the web content is updated with current feature enhancements and additional resources. Adobe AIR based Help provides you with the option to publish updates for your end users at a common server location. The Adobe AIR based Help is intelligent enough to check for updates and prompts users to apply updates when it detects a new version is available.
Review Workflows / Personalization of Help -
Adobe AIR based help files can be configured in such a way that you can add comments to topics and publish those comments at a common location. This feature enables a complete review workflow, whether or not the reviewer is a part of your group/organization.
Reviewers within your network: Reviewers can publish their comments to an XML file on a shared folder. They can also synchronize the comments from other reviewers on the same network. This enable multiple reviewers to simultaneously view the comments being made by other reviewers as they review.
Reviewers outside your network: You can send the .air file to these reviewers who can then export their comments to an XML file and send it to you. You can import these comments into your Adobe AIR application.
Apart from the rewire workflow, the feature is designed to help an end customer personalize Help by adding comments on the same. These comments will not be uploaded to the server, however can be exported to a file and shred with friends over email.
New Classic help Template- A new template called Classic Help has been added. It is named Classic because it is a Tri-Pane Help. Apart from that it has got all the power of any other Adobe AIR based Help template. This template has a new feature called “How do I” that lists all the browse sequences defined in the WebHelp. We recommend that authors design their browse sequences in such a way that they provide complete workflow information to end customers.
Supports Packaging of Merged WebHelp - RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR now supports merged WebHelp. If an author specifies the WebHelp folder of a Master project, the Packager is intelligent enough to detect and convert all referenced projects in the Master Project. However, one needs to be careful while using this feature. It doesn’t provide as much flexibility as Merged WebHelp. A new Package needs to be created every time even when you update any of the sub projects.
In addition, Zoom works flawlessly and search results has been improved. If you have not tried the RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, you can download it now for FREE.
We just released another update for Adobe RoboHelp 7. This update addresses some of the important issues that were reported on the Adobe RoboHelp forums and a few cross browser support issues.
The update is being distributed using the Adobe Update Manager utility, which is shared by all Adobe products. So Adobe RoboHelp 7 users can utilize product's automatic update facility by selecting Help > Updates (Please note - you need to have admin rights to use this automatic update service). Once you update your installation, the version number will bump up from Adobe RoboHelp 7 to Adobe RoboHelp 7.0.2. However if you experience problems updating the Adobe RoboHelp installation from with in the application, you may choose to download the update from Adobe.COM (http://www.adobe.com/support/robohelp/downloads.html) and then apply the same.
Please refer to the Adobe RoboHelp 7.0.2 ReadMe for the list of issues that have been addressed in this update. I am including the same in my post for your reference.
- Akshay
Adobe ® RoboHelp® 7.0.2 ReadMe
Welcome to Adobe RoboHelp 7.0.2 readme. This document contains information about major changes which are included in this update.
List of major issues resolved in this update.
Switching between Topics in Doc pad takes a lot of time.
Encoding issues If a CHM file with a name different than the Project name.
Structured cross-references and structured index markers losses their links in the generated output.
Auto-size pop-up links in WebHelp/Pro SSL do not auto-size when viewed in Firefox.
Special character such as apostrophe doesn’t get rendered properly in output generated by RHW.
First topic map Ids in a RHW project does not work while testing it using CSH test tool.
Map ID's do not work when generating WinHelp 4 in RoboHelp 7 for Word.
Navigation and Top pane are absent in WebHelp Output if Add Mark of the Web is checked for Chinese and Korean language Code Pages
Content pane disappears from the view in WebHelp output when a page is refreshed in Firefox 2.0.13.
Topics in Flash Help output don’t get displayed properly in the correct frame when linked from the Table of Contents in Flash Help output.
TOC/Glossary/Index fields are shown empty in the FlashHelpPro Layout published to RH Server 7if the project name contains German or French characters.
Error Wizard doesn’t display any errors even when there are errors and warnings while generating WinHelp 2000 in RoboHelp for word.
If number of Conditional Build Tags (CBT) is high, some of the CBT may not work to exclude certain topics.
Hyperlink for FrameMaker File (.book) containing external cross references does not work.
Any update done on a topic while working in HTML view of the topic doesn’t get reflected in topic.
Indexes don’t get generated in XML output.
Non Scrolling regions are not reflected in the WinHelp output for RHW project.
Robo Screen Capture loses the editions made after pressing cancel in “Save As” dialogue.
Resizing the TOC causes the contents of the toolbar to also appear in the minibar when viewing the output help in Firefox 2.0.13
TOC items font size increases when WebHelp is viewed in Safari browser on Mac OS.
Entire frame height is not used by TOC, index and other left panes when WebHelp is opened on UNIX.
Style mapping is not exported if a cross-ref is mapped
The Style applied on the Variable does not appear in the HTML generated through FM add/import.
Two level indices are not shown properly in output.
Import Word doesn't work in RH6 if RH6 and RH7 are installed simultaneously.
On opening a word document from internet explorer the word addin association is lost with msword for RHW.
TOC links for some topics in a WinHelp project may not work.
Character style changes are applied to Para style if the Para and Char styles have same name.
Custom format Cross reference may not work for some specific formats.
Error is generated while linking TFS as source control provider with RoboHelp.
Auto sync with the TOC is broken when WebHelp is viewed via Firefox.
The Image generated for equations in FM files are lossy and distorted.
Variables get lost in cross references if they are mapped to any RH cross ref blocks
If RoboHelp project configuration files contain Japanese characters, error occurs on compiling and the context-sensitive help does not work.
Invalid link is observed for index keyword to custom windows in Microsoft HTML Help project.
Variables in FrameMaker file may get lost in cross references if they are mapped to any RoboHelp cross ref. blocks.
Cross references may lose their links while importing a FrameMaker file in RoboHelp.
Copyright 2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.
As you are aware, we implemented Multiple Document Support (MDI) in Adobe RoboHelp HTML 7. However, this change resulted in a small performance bug on systems having large number of fonts installed on your system.
I request customers to remove the extra fonts that they were not using for enhancing problem and believe me I hated stating that. However, today I am happy, as we have fixed the problem and the fix is available through Tech Note - 40336 on Adobe.com. All you have to do is download a single dll and replace it in the Adobe RoboHelp HTML 7 installation.
During the WritersUA conference and more recently, the eLearning Guild conference we showed Adobe RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and in both conferences this was a real hit. Since customers continue to ask how they can create AIR-based information systems, Adobe Senior Product Evangelist, RJ Jacquez, has created a Getting Started Training Video.
RoboHelp Packager is a solution for anyone (not just developers) who wants to build any type of online information systems in Adobe AIR format and not just online help systems. For example in eLearning, the packager can used to create Performance Support Systems, Searchable Knowledge bases, electronic libraries, electronic Catalogs or just a way to package Captivate movies into a single file deliverable (.air); in Technical Communication, the most obvious ones are creating Online Help systems, searchable knowledge bases or just a way to package mechanical 3D models and deliver them as a .air file.
As the title suggests, this article is primarily for people upgrading from RoboHelp X5 or earlier releases. For those of you who are upgrading directly from RoboHelp X5 to Adobe RoboHelp 7, you should not only look at the new features that we implemented in Adobe RoboHelp 7, but should also look at the features that we implemented in Adobe RoboHelp 6.
There is a lot of information on the Adobe.com on the new features implemented in Adobe RoboHelp 7; however, I believe the Reviewer’s Guide is amongst the best document that describes the functionality in a structured manner. You can access and download the Reviewer’s Guide for Adobe RoboHelp 7 from the following web address: http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/pdfs/robohelp_7_reviewers_guide.pdf
However, there is little information on Adobe.com on the features that were implemented in the previous release (Adobe RoboHelp 6). Since this product had a very small shelf life, approximately nine months, there is little information about the same on the web too. Hence, I thought it might be useful to share the Reviewer’s Guide for Adobe RoboHelp 6 (Click to DOWNLOAD). When you download, you shall get a zip file that has Demo Assets, Getting Started Guides for Adobe RoboHelp 6 and Adobe RoboHelp Server 6 and the Reviewer’s Guide as Adobe PDF. You shall find Demo Assets useful if you want to follow “Try it” sections in the Reviewer’s Guide.
I hope this blog entry helps you find more reasons to upgrade :)
You might be aware that, Adobe released an Alpha build of Adobe AIR for Linux a couple of days ago. You can read more about the same and download a build from the Adobe Labs website. We had released RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR when this was not available and we claimed that the output (an .air) created using RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR will work on Linux when we release Adobe AIR for Linux. I got a number of queries around that claim, but couldn’t substantiate it then. However, I am happy to announce that you can now download and install Adobe AIR for Linux on a Linux machine and then install any output created using RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR. The best part is you will be amazed to see that the complete experience including installation is exactly similar on all platforms.
Since Adobe RoboHelp is a Windows only product and many of us might not have access to an Apple Mac machine or a Linux machine, I thought I must share my experience of installing an .air file created using RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR on all the three platforms - Win, Mac and Linux.
So what I did was, I picked up the “Customer Care” sample project that we ship with Adobe RoboHelp and packaged its WebHelp output to a .air file and then installed the same on a Microsoft Windows XP machine, an Apple Mac machine and a Linux machine. As you all know an .air file has to be installed. The installation experience was same and the output (Help) looked exactly same on all three platforms. Here are the images – see it for yourself.
Figure 1: Customer Care on Microsoft Windows (Larger Image)
Figure 2: Customer Care on Apple Mac (Larger Image)
Adobe Senior Product Evangelist,
RJ Jácquez, has created three On Demand training videos to help customers get started with Adobe Technical Communication Suite. A large number of customers have been asking us for training material on the Suite. I hope you will find this useful. Please see the details below-
In Part 1, you will learn about leveraging live and interactive 3D models from virtual any CAD/CAM/CAE software in your technical and instructional documents using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. This training video includes all exercise files needed for you to follow along with the presenter, and experience first-hand how to convert a 3D CAD file into a highly compressed 3D PDF document and how the included 3D Toolkit software allows you to reuse this model in FrameMaker and then generate an interactive and rich PDF document, that you can distribute to anyone using the free Adobe Reader. The video also guides you through the steps on how to further polish your 3D models using 3D materials and by adding animation that shows your end-users how to disassemble the model.
In Part 2, you will learn how to supplement your technical and instructional design documents with engaging Adobe Captivate demonstrations, simulations and quizzes in the Flash format using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. This training video includes all exercise files needed for you to follow along with the presenter and experience first-hand how to create engaging Captivate demonstrations, simulations and quizzes that can be imported into FrameMaker documents and saved as PDF files, that end-users can playback using the free Adobe Reader. The video also guides you through the steps needed to add a printing poster in FrameMaker and how to generate a single .SWF file from Captivate, which includes the playback bar in the PDF file, as well as other best practices.
In Part 3, you will learn about adding FrameMaker books and documents in RoboHelp as live links and reusing FrameMaker content for creating Online Help systems, Searchable Knowledge bases, Performance Support systems and even Policies and Procedures. Just like the first two, the exercise files are also included in case you want to go over the integration features yourself.
Besides Adobe Technical Communication Suite, there are training videos for Adobe FrameMaker 8 and Adobe RoboHelp 7 available on Help Resource Center. Adobe Certified Trainers (for example, John Daigle is a certified trainer for RoboHelp and Captivate) can help you with formal training, if required. If you are looking for formal training, you can locate Adobe Authorized Trainers in your area from Adobe site.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 has a great multi-authoring support. You can use a Source Control system to achieve the same. In my opinion it is the best way to achieve true multi-authoring. Alternatively, if you want to avoid the complexity of setting up a Source Control system, you may use the Merged Help feature of RoboHelp to achieve multi-authoring. However, I repeat – I strongly recommend using a Source Control as it provides added benefits:
It gives you the flexibility of working on all the files in the project – true multi-authoring. Even two or more authors can work on the same file simultaneously. You may wish to restrict access by setting adequate permissions and/or setting an option for not letting two authors work on the same file.
It also provides Version Management. You can retrieve older version of not just files and folders but even complete projects.
Multi-authoring using Source Control
Adobe RoboHelp 7 has an in-built support to connect to any Source Control that supports Microsoft Source Code Control Interface (MSSCCI) API. This includes most of the Source Control including RoboSource Control (which ships for free along with Adobe RoboHelp 7), Perforce, Visual Source Safe version 6 and 7 etc.
The most important characteristic of this integration is that RoboHelp shields the author from the complexity of the Source Control. An author will never require opening the Source Control program. He can manage most of the tasks like – Adding a project to the Source Control, Retrieving they latest version of the project or any of its older versions, checking the history of a file etc without leaving RoboHelp HTML application. RoboHelp HTML has a very friendly toolbar that can do all of this without the author leaving the authoring application. Apart from this, the application also keeps a track of files that get modified when you work on a project. If you are modifying existing files in a project, they will be automatically checked out, including project files like the ones used for storing Conditional Build tags, User Defined variables, Snippets etc. It also keeps a track of the new files that get created while you work on your project. And as soon as you close your project or application, it will ask you to check all the modified and newly added files into the Source Control program. Simple isn’t it.
Most of the Source Controls programs, including RoboSource Control provide the option of locking and / or notifying the author if a file is already in use or is being updated by another author. Some advanced Source Control systems, including RoboSource Control also allow the same file to be edited by multiple authors at the same time. However, in such a case, the one checking-in the file will have to make sure that he merges all the changes checked-in by another author. At times this could become tricky and thus I would recommend you to do so only if you are a power user. By default, this feature is turned off in RoboSource Control and it will lock a file if the same is being updated by an author.
If you have not looked at RoboSource Control, I would suggest that you give it a try right away. There is a very nice article on the RoboHelp Developer Center by Matthew Ellison that talks about how to set up and use RoboSource Control - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/robosource.html
Multi-authoring using Merged Help feature
Adobe RoboHelp has a very powerful feature, using which an author can set up merging of multiple smaller projects into one single project when the smaller projects are published in a specific folder structure. For the purpose of multi-authoring, you could do the reverse. Meaning thereby, that a single mammoth project can be split into smaller projects in such a way that an author gets to work on an independent help project. The beauty of this feature is that, after you set up the system, you do not have to collaborate with any of the other authors. You can publish your part of the project independent of the other authors. When you publish, the system is smart enough to make changes to just your part of the project without affecting the other part of project. Pretty neat isn’t it.
Multi-authoring is a very powerful feature and providing multi-authoring support is just a small part of it. I will cover it in more detail some other day.
Five weeks ago, I posted on RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and I started with " If you want to know more about the future of Online Help in Web 2.0 world, you may want to check out the Public Beta of RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR." It was a brave statement and I was preparing for a long and extended period of evangelism around Adobe AIR and why it is the most preferred format for your Online Help. However, events have overtaken us.
At the Writers UA Conference two weeks ago, Adobe AIR was a great hit. Within 3 weeks of the public Beta announcement, almost everyone at the conference was talking about the possibilities Adobe AIR provides as a vehicle for delivering Online Help. Throughout the conference, a number of experts, consultants and trainers whom we closely work with - John Daigle, Matt Sullivan, Alan Houser, Kevin Siegel, Rick Stone, Peter Grainge, Rob Houser, Tony Self and hundreds of conference participants endorsed the vision of Adobe AIR. We held additional sessions to provide details on RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and two of the four pundits on the panel mentioned Adobe AIR as the future of user assistance. I had no doubt in my mind that Adobe AIR is the future of Online Help, what's amazed me is the speed at which everyone in user assistance community has embraced Adobe AIR.
If you are one of the few, who have not yet downloaded the free public beta from Adobe Labs, please do so and let us know your feedback.
I am just back from the WritersUA conference. As usual the conference was nice - we had some great sessions, good food and a lot of fun. As I had mentioned in the previous post, we had John Daigle, Peter Grainge and Rick Stone as RoboHelp experts and Matt Sullivan as FrameMaker expert.
I was surprised when two out of the three pundits in the closing session concluded that Adobe AIR is the future. However, that gave me satisfaction as we were able to show the power of Adobe AIR through Beta of RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR.
I thank everyone for showing interest in RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR. We had a number of requests both at the booth and in the conference sessions. We did a couple of sessions about Adobe AIR and RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and got some great feedback. For those of you, who have not got a chance to attend WritersUA, should go ahead and do a free download of the same from //labs.adobe.com/technologies/robohelp and participate in developing this product by providing feedback on the forum on the same web page.
The best part of using the packager is that it accepts WebHelp output produced by either Adobe RoboHelp 6 or Adobe RoboHelp 7 to generate an .air file. You do not have to do anything technical or write code. All you need to do is to go through a conversion wizard which has three screens in total. You can rip apart the WebHelp UI and package the actual content with a new modern looking UI. Packager provides you with an option of picking up from a set of absolutely different looking UI.
Thanks everyone for making this conference a memorable one.
If you are publishing online help for Windows Vista (or one of the platforms you publish to is Windows Vista), you may want to consider using the Unipane skin from RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR. Here is a Captivate Demo of what the output from this skin looks. The help project used is the help file for RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (you can download it from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/robohelp/.
If you will want to see how your project looks in Adobe AIR, please download the Beta from Adobe Labs.
It’s been some time that we have been communicating through this blog. We have an opportunity - if you happen to be attending WritersUA Conference, do make sure that you drop by Adobe booth, and meet me in person. I am happy to announce that we shall have Peter Grainge, John Daigle, Rick Stone, Matt Sullivan apart from the Adobe Team. You shall find these names familiar as they are active on Adobe Forums, and probably this is one such opportunity where you can put a face to these names, again at the Adobe booth.
There would be two Conference Sessions by Adobe:
Introducing Technical Communication Suite on Monday 17th March at 1:15 PM, and
Vendor Technical Presentation on March 18th.
Apart from the in conference sessions, we shall have demonstrations every day in the Adobe Meeting Room:
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR - Presentation by Akshay Madan (2pm to 2.30pm)
Flare to RoboHelp Converter - Presentation by John Daigle (2.30pm to 3pm)
Adobe Community Experts - Project Consultation (3pm to 4pm)
In case you would like to gather information about Adobe Technical Communications Suite, Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe RoboHelp Server, RoboSource Control, RoboScreenCapture, Captivate, FrameMaker, Acrobat or any other Adobe Product, please drop by our booth.
This time we have a new concept introduced by Peter called “Stick It”. They describe it as:
“If you have a RoboHelp problem that's hard to diagnose it helps if we can actually load the project and take a look. Peter says, if you're stuck, "Stick It!". Ah that charming British humor. What he is suggesting is that you bring your RoboHelp Project on a Memory Stick and we'll be glad to take a look and maybe solve any thorny problems you might be having.” – Source HATT list.
Also, if you have any problems, suggestions, enhancement requests regarding Adobe RoboHelp / Adobe RoboHelp Server or other Technical Communications Suite products, you are more than welcome to set up a meeting with me, so that we can talk about them in detail.
Last, but not the least, do not miss the Adobe sponsored Networking Mixer on Monday.
As you all know, RoboHelp experienced some turbulent times in the past while it was with Macromedia. I believe RoboHelp was declared “Dead” in one of the WritersUA conference. This led some of RoboHelp customers to migrate to other products and most importantly MadCap Flare as it was positioned as a replacement for RoboHelp. But as soon as Adobe got hold of RoboHelp and Captivate, things changed. We could clearly see we had all the products (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Acrobat) that a Technical Communicator would ever need and hence that led to creation of a brand new Suite – AdobeTechnical Communication Suite. Since Adobe RoboHelp is one of the main applications in this suite, we have invested heavily in the same and have released two versions of the same. The last version – Adobe RoboHelp 7 is considered as the biggest release in the history of the product.
While we were developing products and gearing up for the Technical Communication suite, we attended a number of conferences and met a number of Technical Communicators – the actual users of the products. One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. We wanted to help these customers come back to RoboHelp, but at the same time we did not want to invest in writing this piece of code as it was targeted at a very small community. We also did a survey and posted a blog to gauge interest and size of this community (refer blog posted by Vivek Jain - Migrating from Flare to RoboHelp). We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007. All of this led us not to invest in this space.
However, John Daigle of Evergreen Online Learning, LLC has worked on a utility that can help this small community of customers (existing Flare users who want to come back RoboHelp). It is available free of cost and can be downloaded by filling just 6 form entries. You can get one from here - http://www.showmethedemo.com/flare-to-robohelp/flare-to-robohelp.htm.
Though John did apprise me that he was working on a utility and asked me to answer some simple questions from time to time, but I never asked and he never shared what exactly he was doing. But when I saw this working today, I was completely amazed at how easy, simple and fast it is. So if you are a Flare customer and want to convert your project to a RoboHelp, all you need to do is, download the converter utility (1 minute job) and specify the Flare project that you want to convert and provide a name of the new RoboHelp project and press OK (another 1 minutes) and you are done. Double click the RoboHelp project (the .xpj file) and you are up and running. If that was not enough, he has another gift for you - he is providing the source code of this utility to the end customers under Common Public License again free of cost.
I will now be able to greet Long Beach and STC Minneapolis customers who had asked for a migration path with a smile on my face – Welcome BACK to RoboHelp. And this won’t have happened without John’s initiative. I personally thank John for investing in this converter business and working for the RoboHelp Community.
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (Beta) enables you to generate Adobe AIR based Online Help by packaging WebHelp output from Adobe RoboHelp 6 and Adobe RoboHelp 7. The Captivate Demo below illustrates the final output for an Adobe RoboHelp 7 sample project - Customer Care. In this demo, I have captured the multi-tab features in the Accordion skin for Adobe AIR, mini-TOC, ability to add comments and favorites, and enhanced search.
If you will want to see how your project looks in Adobe AIR, please download the Beta from Adobe Labs.
I joined Adobe almost eight years ago. I still remember that they gave me a cool looking poster along with some other goodies along with the offer letter. The poster read – “Time flies like an Arrow”. I feel the same today.
As you are aware, RoboHelp had some turbulent time in the past. It was neglected for almost three years. But the time has changed, I love the quote that I received today – It stated – “Adobe RoboHelp is a modern innovative product showing the world what Help would be in Web 2.0 era.”
When I took up the RoboHelp Product Management responsibilities in year 2006, the most frequently asked question was – “What is the future of RoboHelp?” Even before I could start answering the question, the questioner would continue saying that they believe it was DEAD. I had a hard time explaining everyone that RoboHelp was NOT DEAD and that it has a very bright future. However the skepticism continued.
On January 16, 2007, we launched Adobe RoboHelp 6 – the very first release of RoboHelp from Adobe. It was a very short product cycle. The goal of the release was to put an end to the “RoboHelp is dead” fears. And we were successful in accomplishing the goal. However, soon after the release, everyone started bombarding me with a list of features that they wanted in RoboHelp. We were successful in regaining the lost faith and with this we started chalking out the roadmap for a significant release - Adobe RoboHelp 7.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 was very special, primarily for two reasons – 1) We had the complete team and infrastructure in place for shipping RoboHelp and thus could concentrate on just building features and 2) We had a clear vision of Adobe Technical Communication Suite. Eventually the dream came true and we released Adobe RoboHelp 7 and a brand new Adobe Technical Communication Suite on September 25, 2007. This was a new beginning. There we praises all over the web which clearly stated Adobe RoboHelp 7 to be the biggest release in the product’s entire history. I was swamped with messages congratulating and thanking for a phenomenal release which made me believe that everyone liked the release. I thank everyone for showing such warmth.
This Monday, we release “RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR”. This is a brand new utility that converts WebHelp generated from Adobe RoboHelp 6 and Adobe RoboHelp 7 into a single installable Help file. The Help is based on Adobe AIR, and has the best of both worlds - desktop and web, and provides customers the power and flexibility of sophisticated, modern, branded Help systems. I don’t think I can explain you the power by writing more about the same, you will have to experience it yourself. So visit http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/robohelp/, download the utility free of cost and experience what Help would look like in Web 2.0.
And today, I received a personal note from a customer, who quoted RoboHelp as a Modern Innovative Tool.
It’s been a very nice journey - resurrecting a Dead product to a one that is perceived as a Modern Innovative Tool and I am happy to be an integral part of it.
I thank everyone who has supported us all along the way. It wouldn’t have been possible without your support – THANK YOU.
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (Beta) provides two skins (a) Multi-Tab Accordion and UniPane. Each of these skins comes with several themes (color schemes) to choose from. In this post, I share a few screenshots of a Customer Care project (one of the sample projects which is part of Adobe RoboHelp 7) published using Multi-Tab Accordion skin.
You can now open more than one tab in the help. At times you have more than two topics which are of interest and you want to open both of them (from search results or from the TOC menu). However, CHM or WebHelp don't provide an ability to open multiple tabs in the same help window. In the screenshot below, you may also notice the mini-TOC to the right side of the content window. Also note that text of the content pane automatically reflows to adjust for the mini-TOC. Thus, mini-TOC is not hiding any of the content.
You can also add comments to the bottom of each page (see below). Comments are at present stored in the local repository on the client machine.
You can also add favorites - please see the Favorites tab at the bottom of the left pane (see below).
On the top right hand corner, you can list resources (for example, corporate web site, support forum link etc.). If you will want to see how your project looks in Adobe AIR, please download the Beta from Adobe Labs.
If you want to know more about the future of Online Help in Web 2.0 world, you may want to check out the Public Beta of RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR. Adobe AIR is a new initiative from Adobe which provides a cross platform consistent look and feel, seamless offline – online experience and an ability to dynamically refresh content. Add Flash to HTML, ability to provide feedback on help content or knowledge bases, offline – online synchronization*, ability to view Captivate demos and 3D models in help, a single Adobe AIR file which works across platforms – you now have the most advanced output format available for Online Help and Knowledge Bases. Besides TOC, Index, Glossary, Search function, you also get breadcrumbs, mini TOC, browse sequences, an ability to add favorites and comments. You can also add links to resources like knowledge bases, support forums and corporate web site.
If you are using Adobe RoboHelp 6, Adobe RoboHelp 7 or Adobe Technical Communication Suite , you can use the RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR to generate an Adobe AIR application from your WebHelp output. The Public Beta comes with two new skins, (a) Multi-Tab Accordion and (b) UniPane and you can choose from several themes for each of these skins.
I was short on time when I wrote my previous post and hence did not mention the exact list of issues that have been resolved in the recent update to Adobe RoboHelp 7. I thought that getting out the message was much more important than describing the issues. Today, I will improve upon that by listing down all the issues fixed in Adobe RoboHelp 7.0.1 (when you apply the Update the version number changes from 7 to 7.0.1)
Rather than writing out the issues myself, I thought it might be more accurate to just Cut and Paste contents from the "Read Me" itself. So here is the list of issues:
Search does not work properly in CHM output generated in complex asian languages.
When an X5 Project is upgraded to RoboHelp 7.0 some topics may remain empty in certain scenarios.
Browse sequence doesn’t get auto generated via TOC on importing complex Frame maker file.
If style sheet is accessed by clicking Format | Styles, then after style sheet creation changes to the styles could not be made successfully in the first attempt. The dialog has to be reopened to make changes.
Any formatting changes to a paragraph could not be saved as a paragraph style on the fly using Formatting toolbar.
Search does not work properly in CHM output generated in few languages.
When an X5 project is upgraded to RoboHelp 7.0 topic files-names might get converted to Title Case.
Images with Text wrapping applied do not appear in Printed Documentation output.
DHTML effects applied on styles do not get automatically updated without opening the topic.
Security vulnerability related to cross-site scripting attacks in WebHelp and FlashHelp Single Source Layouts has been fixed.
Frame Maker style with DHTML effects when mapped to a RoboHelp style do not retain DHTML effects on mapping.
While renaming a Snippet or a UDV, the Topics opened in the editor may get saved without a prompt.
While viewing content in Mozilla Firefox, some of the TOC Books may not open until any topic is opened manually. Additionally the default topic is not shown if it is under some book.
In certain scenarios hotspots created on Shed files are missing in the FlashHelp output for RoboHelp for Word.
Conditional Build Tags when applied differently in multiple cells of a table do not appear properly in output.
Previewing of an unsaved topic results in saving the topic without giving any prompt.
HTML topics may not get generated if a structured Frame Maker file is imported or added to a RoboHelp project.
In case of multiple cross reference markers applied to paragraphs each linked to different sources in a FrameMaker file, the hyperlinks are not formed on importing or linking the file to RoboHelp project.
Inserting image with path more than 120 characters do not work properly.
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As mentioned in the list we have also fixed the vulnerability related to cross-site scripting attacks in WebHelp and FlashHelp. You can read more about this on the following Security Bulletin published by Adobe:
We just released an update for Adobe RoboHelp 7. This update addresses some of the important issues that were reported on the Adobe RoboHelp forums. Apart from bug fixes, the new update will patch your installation so that you can produce more secure Help Systems.
The update is being distributed using the Adobe Update Manager utility, which is shared by all Adobe products. So Adobe RoboHelp 7 users can utilize product's automatic update facility by selecting Help > Updates. Once you update your installation, the version number will bump up from Adobe RoboHelp 7 to Adobe RoboHelp 7.0.1.
I am not too sure if you are aware that the Help for Adobe RoboHelp 7 and Adobe RoboHelp Server 7 is posted on Adobe Help Resource Center (http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/). You can visit this page and access it even if you do not have Adobe RoboHelp license. Please visit this page for browsing latest Help, Getting Started Guides, Installation guides and other resources. We recently posted some Video tutorial showcasing the new Adobe RoboHelp 7 features on the Help Resource Center. Here is a list of tutorials posted on the website:
Explore the RoboHelp 7 interface Get a feel for the new look of Adobe RoboHelp 7. Learn about the Multiple Document Interface, which lets you work simultaneously on multiple topics. Video (3:21 minutes)
Personalize the RoboHelp 7 user interface Get a feel for the new look of Adobe RoboHelp 7. Learn how to group pods, customize the user interface and save your custom environment. Video (4:32 minutes)
Import Adobe FrameMaker files into RoboHelp 7
Learn how to map styles when importing FrameMaker files into Adobe RoboHelp 7. Video (5:55 minutes)
Unicode Support Learn about Unicode support and localization feature in Adobe RoboHelp 7, which helps create content in 35 languages. Video (4:16 minutes)
Snippets Learn how to create, insert, delete, and manage Snippets in RoboHelp projects. Video (2:06 minutes)
Enhanced end-user experience Learn about new features in Adobe RoboHelp 7 like Synonyms, Search Highlighting, and Breadcrumb Navigation, which enhance user experience. Video (3:02 minutes)
New HTML editor Learn how to improve productivity using features like color coding, enhanced Find / Replace, and Intellisense in the new HTML editor in Adobe RoboHelp 7. Video (3:12 minutes)
Multiple tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries Learn how to effectively single source content by defining and managing multiple Table of Contents, Indexes, and Glossaries in a single RoboHelp 7 project. Video (4:08 minutes)
Integration with RoboScreen Capture Learn how to use RoboScreen Capture for capturing and inserting screenshots into Adobe RoboHelp 7 HTML. RoboScreen Capture ships for free with Adobe RoboHelp 7. Video (2:31 minutes)
Integration with Adobe Captivate Learn how to create powerful and engaging simulations in Adobe Captivate, and import them into Adobe RoboHelp 7 HTML. Video (3:22 minutes)
I hope you will find these tutorials informative and useful.
I am seeing a number of debates happening across support forums and mailing lists about which authoring tool (FrameMaker or RoboHelp) is better suited for a specific purpose. Both RoboHelp and FrameMaker are really powerful authoring tools for technical communication. FrameMaker provides a print WYSIWYG authoring environment and is the best Print and PDF publishing tool. RoboHelp provides an HTML WYSIWYG authoring environment and is the best publishing tool for knowledge bases and online help with support for largest number of output formats. RoboHelp supports Dynamic HTML effects while auto-numbering and cross-references are major strengths of FrameMaker.
Both FrameMaker and RoboHelp provide
strong support for single sourcing including variables, conditional tags and snippets (text insets in FrameMaker),
support for multiple TOCs, indexes, glossaries,
support for tables, images, Captivate demos, Flash, 3D PDFs,
template based authoring,
support for long documents (FrameMaker books often exceed 1,000 pages) and large projects (RoboHelp projects often exceed 1500 topics) and so on.
With Adobe Technical Communication Suite, you don't need to choose between RoboHelp and FrameMaker. You get both of them (with Captivate and Acrobat 3D) at an attractive price. Adobe Technical Communication Suite provides a complete solution for technical communication. Adobe Technical Communication Suite is probably the right product for you, if any of the following holds true -
PDF/print is an important output format for you (need FrameMaker and Acrobat), or
You send documentation for review to subject matter experts, customers and vendors (need Acrobat 3D for PDF based review and commenting workflow along with FrameMaker or RoboHelp), or
You are publishing or planning to publish for multiple channels – PDF or print and online help (need FrameMaker, Acrobat and RoboHelp).
You are using Structured FrameMaker for authoring XML documents and want a more flexible solution than XSL transforms and reduce the cost to customize and manage XSL transforms for every minor change needed in the Online Help output (need FrameMaker and RoboHelp), or
You are authoring in DITA and need a better publishing tool than DITA open toolkit (need FrameMaker, Acrobat and RoboHelp), or
You want to improve the effectiveness of your technical communication by using Flash movies or Adobe Captivate demos to illustrate the workflows (need Captivate along with RoboHelp or FrameMaker), or
You are part of an industry where 3D visualization can substantially improve effectiveness of technical communication, for example, manufacturing - engineering, automobiles, construction, aerospace, real estate and so on (need Acrobat 3D with RoboHelp or FrameMaker), or
You are currently using or will use two or more products from the Suite (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Acrobat 3D).
I certainly believe that above scenarios hold true for most of the technical communicators. In a later post, I will discuss further on this topic.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 has one of the most innovative and powerful feature of single sourcing, support for hierarchical TOC and hierarchical Index. When you bring content from several sources in RoboHelp, RoboHelp enables you to add that content in a specific folder. For example, for a FrameMaker book, RoboHelp creates a master folder at the book level and sub-folders each representing the Chapters in the book.
By enabling multiple TOC, Index and Glossary, RoboHelp allows to manage your content in a separate space. When you update the content in FrameMaker document, the TOC and Index for the linked FrameMaker books are automatically updated.
In RoboHelp 7, you can now add a TOC inside a TOC as a placeholder enabling a hierarchical structure for TOC. Similarly, you can now add an Index inside an Index as placeholder enabling a hierarchical structure for Indices. This is a really powerful functionality for single sourcing.
You can also include 3D models in a Knowledge base and Online Help. As part of Adobe Technical Communication Suite, you get Acrobat 3D and RoboHelp. Acrobat 3D enables you to capture 3D models from several CAD applications and convert the 3D model to a PDF. And you can include the PDF file containing the 3D model as a baggage file in RoboHelp. RoboHelp enables you to publish the PDF along with Online Help or a Knowledge Base.
Please notice the TOC entry in RoboHelp refers to the baggage file.
The FlashHelp output of this simple projects contains the PDF which can be accessed as part of a Knowledge Base and Online Help. Please click on the button to start the Adobe Captivate demo below.
With single sourcing workflow from FrameMaker to RoboHelp for HTML publishing and powerful content aggregation functionality available in RoboHelp, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Do explore more and share your experiences.
Though, I had mentioned in my previous post that I would be talking about Translation Workflows, but then I realized that I need to first talk about a new Single Sourcing feature that we have built in Adobe RoboHelp 7 - Multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries.
Now using RoboHelp 7, you can define multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries in a single project. But why would you want to have multiple TOCs in a single project? You can do that for different audiences of the same project - say Standard user and Advanced users or for different output types – say print and Web output or Help for two different flavors of a Project – Basic, Standard, and Professional or for supporting different languages say – English, French, German and Japanese. For achieving single souring in true sense, you need to have multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries.
Since there can be multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries in a single RoboHelp project, we need a mechanism to manage the same. And for this very reason, there is a change in the way TOCs are handled in RoboHelp 7. We have moved all the management to Project Manager. So in case you want to define a new TOC or edit an existing TOC or delete a TOC, you will have to go to the Project Manager and access Multiple Table of Contents folder. Indexes and Glossaries are also managed through Project Manager.
Apart from this, as you are already aware, Adobe RoboHelp 7 supports Multiple Document Interface (MDI), so it allows you to open up multiple TOCs and work across them – copy paste items from one TOC to another etc. This is how the multiple TOCs look like when you open them up in RoboHelp 7.
One important thing to note is that there is a default TOC in every project. The Default as the name signifies is the TOC used when you do not specify a TOC while generating a SSL. You have the ability to use any of the defined TOCs when you generate a SSL.
As you see in the above snapshot, most of the times there is a big overlap in the TOCs. As you see in the snapshot above, there are two TOCs – one for Customer Care executives and one for Mortgage Specialist executives. Since, the knowledge bases for the Mortgage Specialist executives is always a super set of the knowledge base for basic Customer Care executives (As depicted in the snapshot above), if you make a change in the Customer Care TOC, you will be forced to redo the changes in the Mortgage Specialist TOC. RoboHelp 7 provides a yet another Single Sourcing featuring called Place Holder TOC in the new TOC Editor. To achieve single sourcing what we can do is remove the first three folders in the Mortgage Specialist TOC (the ones that correspond to Customer Care TOC) and instead add a TOC Place Holder for Customer Care TOC as shown in the snapshot below.
Now when you generate a SSL using the Mortgage Specialist TOC, the Customer Care TOC Place Holder will get replaced by the actual contents of TOC at the time of generation. You can view TOC Place Holder as a kind of a reference to another TOC that will be picked at the time to final generation.
I hope I made some sense in the above explanation. We can also use TOC Place Holder for aggregating content defined across multiple TOCs. Let’s discuss how we can achieve the same. Suppose there are two authors working on the same Knowledge base – one is responsible for general Customer Care Knowledge base, however the other one is concerned just about the stuff that relates to Mortgage Specialist executives. The goal is t to generate a single master knowledge base which will contain all the topics defined in the RoboHelp project.
To achieve this, what we can do is, ask the first author to work on the Default TOC, i.e. Customer Care and ask the other author to define a new TOC, say Mortgage Specialist. However, this time we will ask him to just add the Mortgage Specialist related stuff to this TOC. Probably the TOC’s will look something like this:
Now for aggregating the two TOCs, you can either define a third TOC with two Place Holders (one for Customer Care and the other one for Mortgage Specialist) or you can add a Place Holder in Customer Care TOC that references to the Mortgage Specialist. The first approach is generally useful when you have a number of TOC Place Holders. So we shall follow the second approach in the demo below:
All the above examples are shown using the Customer Care Sample Project that we ship with Adobe RoboHelp 7. Index and Glossary have similar features and are implemented in the same fashion in Adobe RoboHelp 7. It’s now your turn to start playing with these Single Sourcing features and to see how best you can make use of the same in your real life projects.
I know I have exceeded the limit that an ideal blog post should be but it would be incomplete if I do not mention that RoboHelp 7 also allows you to add User Defined Variables in TOC entries and lets usage of Conditional Build Tags to TOC items (Books, topics etc). All these features put together result in most powerful Single Sourcing capabilities that no other HAT provides at this moment.
So to summarize:
Create as many multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries as you like. They can be given unique names to help manage them.
Copy/Paste editing works across multiple TOC/Index/Glossary.
Aggregate multiple TOCs, Indexes using the Place Holder feature.
Use User Defined Variables while defining the TOC items.
Apply Conditional Build tags on TOC items.
At time of publishing, your custom TOC/Index/Glossary can be chosen on the fly.
Translation workflows are enhanced because you can have a separate TOC/Index/Glossary for each language.
RoboSource Control integration is enabled.
You guessed it correctly, we are now set to talk about Translation Workflows and I shall do that in my next post.
Adobe Technical Communication Suite enables a single sourcing workflow from FrameMaker to RoboHelp for HTML publishing. While it is ideal to maintain all the content in FrameMaker, there are special situations which may require the RoboHelp content to be out of sync from FrameMaker documents either for short duration or for small set of topics. These special situations can relate to project deadlines or project requirements which make the process of maintaining a single source difficult.
Adobe RoboHelp 7, as part of Adobe Technical Communication Suite, provides a new and really powerful functionality of managing this Out of Synchronization behavior. First, it provides a visual indicator the moment there is a change in RoboHelp content for a Linked FrameMaker document. Second, it allows you to select a set of topics which you want to preserve when the content is updated again. Since you can manage this at HTML topic level, you can control this at a granular level. Lastly, you can also delete topics and not regenerate these topics during the next update.
Here is a Captivate demo of this feature (Update - I am adding a "Click to Start" button on the demos - Thanks Rick for your suggestion). Do share your comments and suggestions with me.
I am back after a short break. There was a lot of launch related stuff that had to be completed after RoboHelp 7 and RoboHelp Server 7 ship and then it was time for me to take a break as well.
OK, today I shall talk about a couple of features that would be of interest to people who are involved in producing content in multiple languages.
The world is shrinking and businesses are now becoming truly global with markets all across the world. To cater to global customers, the product, including documentation needs to be customized as per local market. This means that there is a greater need to translate documentation in different languages. Adobe RoboHelp 7 and Adobe RoboHelp Server 7 will help you author, manage, translate and publish your content in multiple languages.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 is now Unicode complaint, meaning thereby that you can use RoboHelp 7 to design your Help System / Knowledge base in any language. To be precise in all languages those are written Left to Right and Top to Bottom (LRTB). RoboHelp 7 however has built –in supports for 35 languages which include Eastern European and Asian languages. When we mention support for 35 languages, it essentially means that RoboHelp is pre set for producing Content for all these 35 languages – you do not need to worry about skins, setting up dictionary, spell check etc. When you select a language in the Project settings, everything gets automatically set up – skins, dictionaries etc. Please refer to the table below that summarizes the Language Support built in RoboHelp 7.
Languages
Authoring and editing support
Dictionary
Spell Check
Thesaurus
Auto Correct
English, Danish , Dutch , French , German , Italian , Norwegian , Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese
Yes
No
No
No
No
Unicode feature in RoboHelp also allows you to have content in multiple languages in a single topic, Glossary, Index and TOC. This is really helpful when you want to create a single page that caters to people in different geographies. You can see a real use case in the Customer Care sample that comes along with RoboHelp 7. Also, you can have different topics in different languages.
Apart from this, RoboHelp 7 now can be installed in four different languages – English, French, German and Japanese. While we developed this, we made sure that the projects are binary compatible – meaning thereby that an author who uses German version of RoboHelp can send across the project to a colleague in Japan who can work upon this project in Japanese version of RoboHelp 7.
Enough of talking – let’s see this in action
Click on Start in the Captivate Demonstration above to start the same. It is an interactive demo and you will be required to click on Next and Continue buttons during the demonstration.
Coming up next - RoboHelp 7 - Support for Translation workflows.
Adobe Technical Communication Suite enables a HTML publishing workflow from FrameMaker to RoboHelp. While adding FrameMaker files as live links in RoboHelp, you can map FrameMaker styles to RoboHelp styles. RoboHelp uses a specific style sheet fmstyles.css which can be modified for custom needs.
1. The style information in RoboHelp can also be edited after the content has been imported in RoboHelp. Please make sure you make these style changes in fmstyles.css since all the style sheets in the RoboHelp project for FrameMaker files are derived from this style sheet. If you make changes in this style sheet, all the linked chapters from the FrameMaker book will inherit the change which will be consistently applied across the project.
2. If you want to edit the style information specific to a Chapter (from the FrameMaker book), you may want to create a style in FrameMaker for that Chapter. By creating a unique style specific to that Chapter, you can now map this style to any RoboHelp style. If needed, you can also add styles in fmstyles.css. The style sheet can be edited using RoboHelp User Interface.
I am including a Captivate demo of how you can edit style information for linked FrameMaker files (Update- I have added a "Click to Start" button to the demo). I hope you will find this useful. Please let me know your comments.
I have been talking about various features and settings for linking FrameMaker documents in RoboHelp. Today, I’ll take you through the functionality offered when the linking of files is already done. Yes, let’s see how you can update these files.
If you want to change some of the settings you specified at the time of linking files, right-click on the linked file and select ‘Properties’.
‘FrameMaker Document Settings’ Dialog opens up. All the setting dialogs which were seen during the initial linking can be seen as tabs here.
You can choose to update a particular chapter by changing the settings for that particular chapter or you can update the settings for the whole book (right click the book icon and then change properties).
Once settings are changed, the icon changes to red representing an internal un-synchronization.
As can be seen below, if properties are changed for the whole book, all child level entries too get unsynchronized.
Right-clicking an icon gives the update options. Just choose whether you want a simple Update or Force Update. One the selection is made, RoboHelp will quickly update your files taking care of your updated settings!
Table of Contents (TOC) is an important part of FrameMaker books. RoboHelp recognizes this importance and allows the conversion of your source FrameMaker TOC to the corresponding TOC in RoboHelp.
I’ll explain the steps with an example. At the time of importing/linking FrameMaker book,
1. Place a check in the ‘ConvertFrameMaker Table of Contents’ box in the Content Settings dialog.
2. Click to open the Browse FrameMaker file dialog.
3. Navigate to the source files folder, select the source TOC and click ‘Open’. By Default, the TOC path would be populated with the first TOC file in the book. If your book has multiple TOCs, you can choose the one of your interest.
4. Select the Create new associated TOC radio button. This will create a RoboHelp TOC for the imported FrameMaker topics.
5. Enter a name for the this TOC. For our example, I have called it ‘TOC1’.
On completion of the import process, ‘TOC1’ would be created under ‘Table of Contents’ folder in the ‘Project Manager’ pod as shown below.
Double clicking ‘TOC1’ would open the TOC.
Snap-shot of the source TOC is shown below. We see that ‘Filter By Attribute’ is a book in the RoboHelp TOC. Topics under this book are same and in the same order as in the source TOC.
The styles in your FrameMaker TOC determine which headings become books, sub-books, or pages in the RoboHelp TOC. These levels are based on the following elements in the decreasing order of priority:
Left-most indent
Font Size
Font Weight
Note: Headings with indented items are converted to book entries.
In Adobe RoboHelp 7, a project can have multiple TOCs, multiple indexes and multiple glossaries. In addition to creating multiple TOCs and indexes, RoboHelp also provides an ability to create a hierarchical structure of TOCs and indexes. For more information, please visit my following blog post
Perhaps the most important, and most powerful, feature of the FrameMaker import process is the style mappings. You can map FrameMaker paragraph and character styles to RoboHelp styles, which will automatically reformat your FrameMaker content for publication in RoboHelp. In addition, you can also specify:
New definitions for FrameMaker cross-reference formats (e.g., to remove page numbers from cross-references in RoboHelp output)
Style names that will trigger topic breaks in RoboHelp
FrameMaker styles to ignore when the styles are imported into RoboHelp
A default RoboHelp style to be applied to unmapped FrameMaker styles
Now, I’ll take you through some of these features in detail.
In the Style Conversion Settings section of the Settings dialog, there is an option to Convert AutoNumber to HTML list. This is generally preferred if the FrameMaker document does not include complex numbering (e.g., multilevel section numbering).
If you want to use a user defined HTML Tag for the paragraph styles, you can specify the tag e.g. ‘Pre’ tag. You can even choose the styles where this tag should be applied.
For applying properties, Click Select to open the FrameMaker Styles Conversion Properties dialog. Select the styles where these properties should be applied. Click OK to close the FrameMaker Styles Conversion Properties dialog and to return to the Style Settings dialog.
In the Style Mappings section of the Style Settings dialog, click Edit. The FrameMaker - RoboHelp Style Mappings dialog opens. In this dialog you can map each FrameMaker paragraph, cross reference, and character style to a RoboHelp style.
Select the type of style you want to map from the Style Mapping Type list. By default, the paragraph styles are selected. The individual paragraph styles found in the FrameMaker document and the RoboHelp project are displayed as shown in the screen-shot below. The FrameMaker styles are listed in the left column; the RoboHelp styles are listed in the right column. By default, each RoboHelp style is set to [source], which indicates that the FrameMaker style has not been mapped to a RoboHelp style. Preview of these styles is available in the bottom part of the dialog.
You may want to use different cross-reference styles in print form and Help deliverables. For example, page numbers are useful in PDF documents, but have no meaning in Online Help. You can map FrameMaker cross-reference formats to RoboHelp Cross Reference styles with appropriate definitions for online delivery.
For the screen-shot shown below, you may want to change the ‘Heading & Page’ cross-reference to paragraph text. Click Heading & Page to select the cross-reference style. The current definition includes a page number. Double-click <$paratext> to adjust the cross-reference format to specify only the title of the target topic.
I will touch other aspects in my next post. You can reach me at mahesh@adobe.com
Adobe Technical Communication Suite comprises of Adobe FrameMaker 8, Adobe RoboHelp 7, Adobe Captivate 3 and Adobe Acrobat 3D ver 8. FrameMaker 8 extends the structured authoring functionality of FrameMaker to enable authors to work efficiently with DITA. With Captivate and Acrobat 3D, you can add Flash demo files and 3D models in FrameMaker 8. On the output side, FrameMaker lets you build a FrameMaker book from a DITA map to generate PDF and online help. Once you have created a FrameMaker Book, RoboHelp provides an ability to add them as live links, that is, any update to the Book will get reflected in Help output with just two clicks (Update and Publish). With RoboHelp 7, you can generate any of the output formats like CHM, WebHelp, FlashHelp, JavaHelp or OracleHelp.
DITA is now core part of our product strategy. As customers adopt DITA and standards evolve, I envision enhanced support for DITA across Adobe Technical Communication Suite.
DITA Support in FrameMaker 8 - The DITA functionality of FrameMaker 8 is provided by a set of application features combined with a set of structure applications, which together provide core tools for DITA authoring and publishing. The DITA functionality of FrameMaker 8 can be extended for a variety of uses.
FrameMaker offers a range of features for DITA support:
Import/Export processing: Includes the use of some FrameMaker-specific constructs and elements (notable by their fm prefix), which are present while authoring in FrameMaker but translated to DITA-conformant XML during the import/export process. This ensures interoperability with other systems.
DITA map support: FrameMaker offers a structure application for creating and editing DITA maps, as well as managing relationship tables. Double-clicking on a topic within a map opens that topic for editing.
Conref support: When you open a file, FrameMaker resolves conrefs, and displays the referenced content as a text inset in the open document. FrameMaker also features the Reference Manager dialog box for inserting conrefs.
Xref support: When you open a file, FrameMaker automatically resolves <xref> elements and displays any associated text within FrameMaker. You can turn this feature on or off.
Output support: For generating Adobe PDF content, FrameMaker lets you build a FrameMaker book from a DITA map. As the XML authored in FrameMaker conforms to the DITA standard for structure, you can also publish using other DITA tools, such as the DITA Open Toolkit. You can also download the
Adobe FrameMaker 8 plug-in for DITA Open Toolkit from FrameMaker Development Center.
Publishing to HTML using RoboHelp: FrameMaker lets you build a FrameMaker book from a DITA map. RoboHelp as part of Adobe Technical Communication Suite provides an ability to add FrameMaker Books as live links. With RoboHelp, you can add breadcrumbs, browse sequences, Index, TOC, Glossary, Dynamic HTML effects to help output and also map FrameMaker styles to RoboHelp styles, generate context sensitive help mapping files and aggregate content from other applications like Word, DreamWeaver.
You can customize the DITA features of FrameMaker using the DITA Options dialog box or by editing the ditafm.ini file.
Adobe Technical Communication Suite provides an attractive opportunity to upgrade for existing customers of FrameMaker, RoboHelp and Captivate. You can upgrade from any previous version of these products at a special discount. As a general rule of thumb, if you are currently using or plan to use more than one of the four products, you may find upgrade an attractive option.
Most FrameMaker users also use Adobe Acrobat software. By upgrading to Adobe Technical Communication Suite you get all the new features of FrameMaker 8 — including Unicode, DITA, 3D support, and enhanced conditional text handling—plus all features of Acrobat 3D Version 8. In addition, you get various enhancements that are unique to FrameMaker 8 for Adobe Technical Communication Suite, such as improved integration with Adobe RoboHelp 7, Adobe Captivate 3, and RoboScreen Capture. You can use the complete help authoring and publishing features of RoboHelp 7 to create help systems and knowledge bases. Adobe Captivate 3 enables the production of product simulations and demonstrations in the Adobe Flash® format by combining a realtime screen capture technology with a powerful editing environment for creating professional, interactive tutorials (complete with scenario branching and quizzes), without programming knowledge or multimedia skills. Based on the industryleading Adobe Flash platform, Adobe Captivate 3 automatically generates interactive, Adobe Flash Player compatible content that can be easily inserted into your FrameMaker and RoboHelp projects, Adobe PDF documents, or distributed via e-mail or the Web.
Engineering design and manufacturing professionals benefit from the latest version of Acrobat 3D along with the ability to export to standard 3D formats. With this suite, you will also be able to incorporate 3D models directly into FrameMaker 8, enabling you to produce rich technical PDF documents with live 3D models. In addition, you will be able to leverage the strengths and benefits of RoboHelp 7 and Adobe Captivate 3 to help meet your other technical communication needs, including the creation of help and support systems, product demonstrations, and simulations.
As a RoboHelp user, you get all the new features of RoboHelp 7 (including Unicode support, breadcrumb navigation support, a new user interface, and enhanced support for single-sourcing) plus enhancements that are only available in RoboHelp 7 for Adobe Technical Communication Suite, such as the ability to work with FrameMaker source files by adding them as links in RoboHelp projects. This provides a high level of control over online output by enabling you to define output settings and style mappings. You can embed engaging Adobe Captivate demonstrations in RoboHelp projects, and select from a range of output formats, including WebHelp Pro and Adobe FlashHelp® Pro.
I am slightly late in sharing this important piece of information with you all - trial builds of Adobe RoboHelp 7, Adobe RoboHelp Server 7 and Technical Communication Suite are now available on the Adobe.com. The specific URL's are:
There are some significant changes that we have done to the Trial version of Adobe RoboHelp. There is no restriction on the number of topics, no scrambling of text in the output. Trial version is a fully functional time bound (30 days validity) build. If you like the Trial and decide to buy the RoboHelp licence, all you need to do is, buy one online and enter the same on the startup screen. You do not need to uninstall the trial build or install anything extra.
There is one important point that you should be aware of - Adobe RoboHelp 7 is supported on Windows 2000, however the Trial is not. So, if you install the Trial version on Windows 2000, it will ask you for a serial number and will not let you run the product in Trial mode.The Trial version is supported only on Windows XP and Vista.
If you have any questions about Platforms supported or other System Requirements, please visit the specific product pages for detailed information on the same.
In case you find some difficultly in installing and/or working with the Trial build, you can refer to the knowledge base articles and Adobe RoboHelp forum. I encourage you to share the feedback about the product. You can reach me at amadan@adobe.com
When you import or add FrameMaker files (.book, .fm and .mif) in Adobe RoboHelp 7, you can also generate Context Sensitive Map IDs from FrameMaker source files. RoboHelp can convert custom markers defined in FrameMaker to map IDs and create bookmarks in HTML topics created during the import.
Authors can choose any custom marker and apply it at the beginning of the paragraphs in the source files. A unique ID should be specified as the marker text at the time of applying this marker. Since this marker text would be used as the marker ID, the marker text should contain only alphanumeric and ‘_’ (underscore) character as shown in the figure below. The custom marker applied is ‘ExpBank’ and the FrameMaker ID for this paragraph is specified as ‘Marker1_Authorised_Persons’.
At the time of importing/adding files in RoboHelp, you need to specify the customer marker type. By default, ‘Define Context Sensitive Help Marker’ text-field is populated with the entry ‘TopicAlias’ and should be overwritten with the appropriate marker name, in this case with ‘ExpBank’ (please see the figure below).
RoboHelp processes the FrameMaker markers with this Marker type. and corresponding RoboHelp numeric Id and associated bookmarks are created. These associations can be seen in the ‘Edit Map IDs’ Dialog (available under ‘Context-Sensitive Help’ in the ‘Project Set-up’ pod).
First Column ‘Map ID’ represents the same ID specified in FrameMaker as the marker text. Second column gives the numeric Map ID which is used in the output and the third column represents the target bookmark.
Update (posted on March 26, 2008 by Vivek Jain) - The behavior has changed after RoboHelp patch 7.0.1. RoboHelp does not generate the mapIDs automatically and enables you to load the developer provided mapping files. If you are generating mapping files for your developers, please generate it through RoboHelp and export it.
For importing the mapping file -> Go to Project Settings Pod, open Context Sensitive Help folder and right click on Map Files. You shall get Import Map File option in the context menu. In the import dialog box you will get option to import .hh, .hm and .h files. Please ensure that Locked option at the bottom is checked. RoboHelp will not touch your file if this option is on.
You can also see a report on the Map Ids (Tools->Reports) as shown in the screen-shot below.
The Map IDs can be tested through the ‘CSH Test’ tool. This tool (shown in the following figure) can be used for testing online/offline help.
In addition, RoboHelp provides several other features like changing the associations, importing and exporting map files etc.
As the title suggests, this is the second part of the blog post that I posted on 3rd October. Now that we you are aware about the new User Interface elements, let's see how can you benefit from them in Adobe RoboHelp 7.
The illustration shows the new look with the multiple document interface (MDI) in the Default Environment. The author can customize the arrangement of pods, menus and toolbars, to create the workspace in which they are most comfortable. After re-arranging the real estate, the author can save different Environments and load them for different workflows. For example, when authoring, you would want fewer items showing in a less cluttered view. Whereas in doing language translation or creating a Table of Contents you would want several items open to be able to drag and drop elements from each.
Pods are new to RoboHelp. Formerly, authors were limited to a work area of static panes that could not be rearranged. Now pods can be easily opened or closed to give the author more screen real estate and eliminate clutter. They can also be dragged and dropped on top of each other to form a group of pods. In the illustration, notice that in the pod titled Project Manager, pods for Project Set-up and Snippets are grouped into one Pane.
RoboHelp lets you take advantage of dual monitors and allows you to place separate pods in any arrangement you like on the second monitor
Let's now take a detailed look at Adobe RoboHelp 7's UI (as shown in the illustration above)
The Project Manager pod which is familiar to longtime RoboHelp authors as a place to keep track of project assets. The TOC, Index and Glossary can now be accessed from Project Manager Pod. There is a change in UI as now Adobe RoboHelp 7 enables you to define multiple TOC, Index and Glossaries in a single project.
The Project Set-up pod along with tabs for Single Source Layouts and Conditional Build Tags.
Beneath the Topics List, User Defined Variables and Toolbox tabs.
The main Design editor view with multiple topics open for easy drag and drop and copy/paste functionality among open topics.
Now we shall see how we can customize the environment in Adobe RoboHelp 7. I believe we have already done a lot of talking, let's see some action.
I hope you like the customizability of the Environment in Adobe RoboHelp 7. Apart from customizing Pods, Panes etc, you can also customize Toolbars and Menus. I shall cover this under yet another blog post.
One of the mjor advancements in Adobe RoboHelp 7 is the new Highly Customizable UI. Today, I shall dive deep into this and talk about finer features that we have implemented in RoboHelp 7.
RoboHelp has always been known for its author-friendly usability and we didn't want to compromise on the same. So it was a difficult task to design the new UI and thus we formulated a set of guide lines:
In no way, would be compromise on the ease of use of RoboHelp
The UI should not be dramatically different from our older UI, so that our existing customers don't feel out of place.
Reduce the total number of clicks. So, essentially a user should be able to access and use a functionality using the new UI, in exactly the same or lesser number of clicks as he could in Adobe RoboHelp 6
Ease of discoverability of functionality - intutive UI.
Provide as much customization as possible to the customer
Apart from customization, we also wanted to enable RoboHelp's UI to handle multiple documents. Now using Adobe RoboHelp 7, you can simultaneously opne, edit, and work upon multiple open topics without saving them. Adobe RoboHelp 7 fully supports Multiple Document Interface (MDI).
We added a couple of new UI elements. I shall now try to explain the new elements. We have grouped functionality based on workflow into different Pods. A Pod can be moved around in application, even outside the application window, and even to a different monitor. There are a number of Pods in RoboHelp. Some can be directly accessed from View Menu ->Pods, however there are a few other Pods like TOC, Index, Glossary that come up when you double click a TOC under “Table of Contents”, or an Index under “Index” or a Glossary under the “glossary” folder under “Project Manager”.
A Pod has three states – Dockable, Hide and Floating. When in Dockable state, a Pod can be grouped along with other pods in a Pane. However, you can change the state to Floating and move it around in the RoboHelp HTML application, even outside the application to another monitor etc. Activating the Hide mode will cause the Pod to disappear. You can view the Pod again by accessing it from View Menu -> Pods and selecting the required Pod.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 provides the functionality of grouping Pods together in Panes. When you group two different Pods, a Pane is automatically generated that contains both the Pods. By default, RoboHelp 7 UI has three Panes – two on the left side of the application and one at the bottom. A Pane can contain as many Pods as you wish.
A Pane has an added functionality to Auto Hide. When you activate this property, all the Pods in that particular Pane will squeeze and you would just be able to see the Pod names along the edge of the application. As soon as you however mouse over the Pod name, that particular pod would fly out. As soon as you click outside the area of the fly out Pod, it will again collapse.
Apart from these UI elements, we have a large area to view and edit topics, called Doc Pad. All topics open up in the Doc Pad. Doc Pad supports functionality of breaking up into multiple vertical and horizontal Doc Pad groups.You can also dock a Pod in the Doc Pad. It might be useful to move the Topic List Pod from the bottom Pane and dock it in the Doc Pad as shown in the image below:
Ah! I thought I would be able to cover the New UI in a single post, but I was wrong. I shall modify the title of the blog and add Part 1 to it. I shall talk about this more in my next post.
RoboHelp can import content from Microsoft Word, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Dreamweaver and also enables HTML authoring in RoboHTML. In Adobe RoboHelp 7, a project can have multiple TOCs, multiple indexes and multiple glossaries. In addition to creating multiple TOCs and indexes, RoboHelp also provides an ability to create a hierarchical structure of TOCs and indexes. For example, let’s say there are three TOCs defined in RoboHelp, say, TOC1, TOC2 and TOC3. RoboHelp allows you to include TOC2 and TOC3 in TOC1. You can add a placeholder in TOC1 and associate TOC2 with the placeholder. This provides an ability to manage separate TOCs for different content brought in from different sources. Now, you can easily integrate content from several sources in RoboHelp.
If you have a linked FrameMaker book in Adobe Technical Communication Suite, you can associate a TOC which is linked to the FrameMaker content, let’s say TOC2. TOC2 will reflect the changes in FrameMaker as content is updated. By placing TOC2 as a placeholder in TOC1, TOC1 becomes the integrated TOC and can be used for publishing the help output. Similarly, you can have a placeholder index – Index 2 in the overall project Index. Thus, you separately manage the changes in FrameMaker and at the same time, aggregate the content in RoboHelp.
RoboHelp also provides an ability to apply conditional build tags to TOC entries and an ability to include variables in the TOC entries. By enabling conditional build tags, variables, multiple TOCs and TOC placeholder to create hierarchical structure of the TOCs, Adobe RoboHelp 7 provides unparalleled content aggregation functionality.
You can’t imagine how thrilled and excited I am. I feel like jumping on my chair. Jump, Jump…
We just announced another significant release of Adobe RoboHelp. Check out RoboHelp product page at www.adobe.com/products/robohelp for more information. Another major update in record 9 months. Oh boy - RoboHelp development is on steroids.
This has been a very special release – we have had some rave comments on the prerelease site about the current release. Customers who have seen this (via our prerelease program) still don’t believe that we could add such major advancements in 9 months. Enough of trumpeting, let’s get down to the point.
Summary of major feature added in Adobe RoboHelp 7:
Highly customizable user interface - Create your own unique workspace with personalized toolbars, menus, keyboard shortcuts and dockable pods that work the way you want. A Multiple Document Interface (MDI) makes it easy to copy/paste and edit across multiple topics in a tiled arrangement. Then save your workspace environment for different projects. Quickly remove clutter of unused interface items to focus on the work at hand.
Full Unicode support - accommodates 35 languages and powerful translation workflows. Localized in 4 languages and binary compatible across languages. Create in a French version and open that same project in a German version.
Enhanced support for FrameMaker file import -Import multiple file formats in .fm, .book, .mif. .bk or .frm file types. Files will be converted to HTML topics.
New HTML Editor - produces cleaner code, customization including color coding and author-configured as well as automatic Intellisense for rapidly inserting commonly used code phrases.
Cross-product integration with Adobe technical communication programs - See how RoboHelp works with Adobe Captivate, FrameMaker, Acrobat 3D and RoboScreenCapture.
Better end-user experience with Search Synonyms, Search highlighting and Breadcrumb navigation.
Improvements to standard features - Word import/export, RoboSource Control 3.1, RoboHelp Server, WinHelp to WebHelp migration
Improvements to Adobe RoboHelp Server - Valuable Feedback Reports and the ability to search the text of non-HTML documents such as PDF, Word, Excel, etc. make this a perfect choice for company Intranets. Many installation and administrative improvements have been made in this release.
There are a number of other features that we have developed in Adobe RoboHelp 7. Even each of the above listed features is a big enough item for a blog discussion. I shall try to cover each of the features in detail in subsequent blogs.
I call him Uncle John, some call him Expert John and he calls himself Scuba John. Yes, I am referring to John Daigle - a very talented RoboHelp expert who loves nature. Today is his birth day (15th September) and he is out in the jungles of Peru to celebrate the same with Anacondas. Hey man what a fine way to celebrate a birth day.
I have received a number of emails where Adobe RoboHelp customers have asked me some basic questions about Adobe RoboHelp Server. So, I thought it might be worthwhile to share some information on the blog.
About Adobe RoboHelp Server
Adobe RoboHelp Server is a server-based Help solution that provides real-time end-user feedback on your Help and knowledge bases. You can view a variety of reports that tell you the issues that users are having with your Help system and knowledge bases, and where you need to provide more information. Results are displayed in an easy-to-view graphical format for quick interpretation. Your Help system resides on a server (like Adobe Help Center), allowing you to take this knowledge and make instant updates to your Help system content.
Key features of Adobe RoboHelp Server
Adobe RoboHelp Server is a powerful way of providing end users with the ability to find information when they have questions. Users can view content using any standard browser (such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) and several operating systems (such as Windows, Macintosh, or UNIX). There's no limit on the number of users who can access the published documents.
Key features of Adobe RoboHelp Server include:
Tracking and reporting of end-user problems with feedback reorts
Adobe RoboHelp Server’s most powerful feature is its feedback mechanism. With this feature, authors receive real-time feedback on what is confusing or missing from their online information and the application. Authors can see where end users are entering the system, what questions they are asking, and most importantly, what questions are going unanswered. Armed with this information, authors can focus on updating the specific areas of the online content that are known trouble spots.
Some of the data gathered includes:
Where users request assistance: The location where repeated requests take place may suggest needed improvements in specific areas of the content.
How users search: Searches that users perform repeatedly can be expanded to include more related information. In addition, information users routinely search for can be moved to a more prominent position in the content for easier access.
How users navigate online content: Authors can track how users move around the online content and how often.
Automatic project merging so that multiple authors can work on different projects simultaneously and merge them at run time into one project
When building an online information system, all authors need to be able to develop and publish their content according to their own schedules. Adobe RoboHelp Server provides automatic project merging so that authors can work on different parts of a project at the same time and publish them to the same engine. When end users view the content, they see one seamless online information system. There’s no need to worry about sharing source or depending on a single author or project – the separate projects are merged when users access the content. Users can navigate across all the projects using the Index, Contents, or Search buttons.
When authors merge projects, each project file in the authoring tool remains intact, but the keywords from the indexes are combined at run time, or when end users access the system from the engine. By default, the projects are added to the table of contents in the order they are published to the engine (authors can customize this order in the authoring tool).
Question grouping that organizes end-user questions together for more accurate and streamlined reporting
When users perform searches, Adobe RoboHelp Server groups similar questions together in reports for authors. Question grouping helps solve the problem of viewing a report that contains long lists of questions that are similar, but phrased in slightly different ways. Authors can read and share reports that are more accurate and streamlined.
Please note – this is not up to the mark as we have removed Natural Language Support from RoboHelp Server.
Support for languages other than English - the run-time interface (including table of contents, index, and search) can be automatically localized and authors can publish projects written in a variety of languages to the same server.
Authors can change the display text on online system’s user interface to another language, including text on the Contents, Index, and Search buttons as well as other text in the user interface. In addition, end users will be able to perform a full-text search of online content in their native language. This allows authors to develop content in languages other than English and take advantage of server-based online information systems.
There are quite a few new features that we introduced in Adobe RoboHelp Server 6, the most significant of them are:
Improved publishing of projects
While publishing projects to RoboHelp Server, only the files that had been modified after the last publish operation are re-published. This improves performance significantly esp. if you have large projects.
FlashHelp Pro
Adobe RoboHelp Server 6 introduces server based FlashHelp. FlashHelp Pro projects can be published to RoboHelp Server. Server features like merging Projects and context-sensitive help are also available in FlashHelp Pro Projects.
Web administrator
Now you can do Remote administration of RoboHelp Server using a web interface. This can be done from RoboHelp itself from the RoboHelp Server tab (this can be enabled from Tools > Options > General). A web browser can also be used for this purpose. Web administration can be used for managing projects, user accounts and groups, viewing reports, and for troubleshooting.
Improved installation experience
Adobe RoboHelp Server 6 is easier to install and setup. Some installer issues which were present in the previous version (RoboHelp Engine 4) have been fixed in this release.
Publish to relational databases
Adobe RoboHelp 6 Server provides out of the box capability to connect to an Oracle or SQL server databases. Connectivity Pack that was required in the previous release is not required now.
I thank RoboHelp enthusiasts for an overwhelming response to the Prerelease Program. We have already exceeded our limit and have thus stopped enrolling new participants.
I also thank active participants of the Program who have helped us shape the next release of RoboHelp by providing excellent feedback.
Rick Stone (popularly known as RoboWizard in Adobe forums) turns 50 today (8th August). We (Adobe RoboHelp Team) wish him a very happy birth day. He has helped and supported a number of RoboHelp users. I take this opportunity to thank him for all the good work he has done over last couple of years, rather decades.
I thank other experts also, who support our Adobe Forums and RoboHelp customers. Thank you, you all are wonderful.
Recently, there have been a number of queries regarding some bugs that have already been fixed by the RoboHelp team and delivered to our customers as patches on top of Adobe RoboHelp 6. In total we have released three patches for fixing bugs that went unnoticed in Adobe RoboHelp 6 and one Security patch that applies to Adobe RoboHelp 6 as well as older versions including X5.
The following are the issues that have been fixed in the patches:
Error, "Internal error encountered, Failed to generate WebHelp." when you generate a merged project. Issue:
When you try to generate a merged project from Adobe RoboHelp 6, you receive these error messages:
"Internal error encountered, Failed to generate WebHelp."
and
"Warning: [path to file] cannot be copied to [path to output]. reason: source does not exist." Reason:
This can occur if you have a relative link in your project that points to a location that is not contained within your project. Solution:
Please visit the following link to get a dll and follow the procedure described therein to patch Adobe RoboHelp 6 installation. http://www.adobe.com/go/kb401652
Generic Windows crash error message when you export Microsoft HTML Help from Adobe RoboHelp 6.Issue:
When attempting to export Microsoft HTML Help from Adobe RoboHelp 6, you get one of the following error messages:
"RoboHelp HTML Application has encountered a problem and needs to close."
or
"An unhandled win32 exception occurred in RoboHTML.exe [3768]."
Reason:
This can occur if you have conditional build tags and tables that contain spans in the same project. Solution:
Please visit the following link to get a dll and follow the procedure described therein to patch Adobe RoboHelp 6 installation. http://www.adobe.com/go/kb401651
Title changes to match file name when importing topics into RoboHelp 6.
Issue:
When you import a HTML file into RoboHelp, it automatically changes the HTML title tag to match the file name. Solution:
Please visit the following link to get a dll and follow the procedure described therein to patch Adobe RoboHelp 6 installation. http://www.adobe.com/go/kb402006
Apart from these bug fixes, there is a security update that we recommed every RoboHelp user should apply. It is regarding a hole in one of the JavaScripts.
A specially crafted URL could be used to create a cross-site scripting attack against files generated by RoboHelp 6, RoboHelp X5 or RoboHelp Server 6. Please visit the Security Bulletin to know more about this and how to patch your RoboHelp installation.
In this post, I would be discussing a question that has been asked a number of times in the recent conferences. A number of customers I meet, are interested in knowing if it is possible to configure Adobe RoboHelp Server to show separate Usability Reports (Most Frequently Asked Questions, Unanswered Questions etc) for multiple Help Systems hosted on a single RoboHelp Server. The answer is YES. However, to enable the same you need to do the following three things:
Add as many Web sites to the IIS as the number of Help Systems that you want to host.
Configure Adobe RoboHelp Server for those many number of Web Sites using the Configuration Manager
Publish each Help system to a separate Web Site
Once you do all these three steps, you will be all set to get separate reports for each of the hosted Help Systems / Knowledge Bases on a single Adobe RoboHelp Server.
Let us now discuss each of these three steps in detail.
Assumption: You already have a working system with Adobe RoboHelp HTML 6 and Adobe RoboHelp Server 6. Also you have a Help system hosted on the default Web site of IIS and are able to see reports for that particular Help System using Adobe RoboHelp Server 6 Configuration Manager.
Now, I shall describe how to host another Help system on the same Adobe RoboHelp Server 6 and still get separate usability reports.
Step1: To set up a new Web site in IIS (the following steps are applicable to Microsoft Windows 2003 Server with IIS 6.0)
To create a new Web site in IIS, follow these steps:
Log on to the Web server computer as an administrator.
Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.
Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Internet Services Manager.
Click Action, point to New, and then click Web Site.
After the Web Site Creation Wizard starts, click Next.
Type a description for the Web site. Note: This description is used internally to identify the Web site in Internet Services Manager only.
Select the IP address to use for the site. Note: If you select All (unassigned), the Web site is accessible on all interfaces and all configured IP addresses.
Type the TCP port number to publish the site on.
Type the Host Header name (the real name that is used to access this site).
Click Next.
Either type the path to the folder that is holding the Web site documents or click Browse to select the folder, and then click Next.
Select the access permissions for the Web site, and then click Next.
Click Finish.
Step2: To configure Adobe RoboHelp Server for the newly added Web site.
To configure Adobe RoboHelp Server, follow these steps:
Launch Configuration Manager. There should be a shortcut on the desktop if you have installed Adobe RoboHelp Server with default settings.
Click File, and then click New Server. Configuration Wizard will open up. Click Next.
Note: It will list all the available websites for which the Adobe RoboHelp Server has not been configured
Choose the new Web site (added in Step1) and then click Next.
Click Next one more time. Note: In this step, the Wizard will configure database.
Once the server has competed configuring the database, click Next and then Finish. Note: Thewizard will end and you will see that the Adobe RoboHelp Server is now configured forthe newly added Web site.
Click View Project to check for the Congratulation message.
Adobe RoboHelp Server is now configured for two Web sites (the Default Web site and the newly added Web site). Subsequent launches of Configuration Wizard will ask for a Web site at the time of initialization.
Step3: To publish help to the newly added Web site.
To publish help to the newly added Web site, follow these steps:
Open the Source of the Help System that you want to publish on the newly created Web site in Step 1 in Adobe RoboHelp for HTML.
Now to publish this Help system on the Adobe RoboHelp Server, In the Project tab, expand the Single Source Layouts folder, Double-click WebHelp Pro.
The WebHelp Pro Publish wizard will open up, then Click Next.
Under the Server group, click New.
Fill in the New Destination dialog. Note: Make sure that you specify the port along with the Server Name. Since you are publishing to the same Server, port must be specified. The Port should the same as the one that has been specified while adding the new Web site in Step1. For example – Server Name – servername:81, if 81 was the port.
Click OK to commit the input in the New Destination dialog.
Click Finish on the main WebHelp ProPublish wizard.
You have now completed all the required steps for setting up the Adobe RoboHelp Server for managing and generating separate reports for two Help Systems that have been hosted on a single Server, but on to two different Web sites. You can use the Configuration Manager to view reports of each of the hosted Help System.
Wow, it couldn't have happened faster than this. We are ready to start the Prerelease Program for the next release of Adobe RoboHelp. You might have already read about some rave reviews of the Sneak Peeks of Adobe RoboHelp that we did at STC, Minneapolis. It's now your turn to get your hands dirty with a prerelease build.
Enrolling into the program does not guarantee access to the prerelease program. You shall get access only once your application has been approved.
Please Note: You would be required to submit a short questionnaire, while you apply for the Prerelease Program for Adobe RoboHelp.
During the application process, please use the "Existing Users" section if you have an existing Adobe Prerelease Program user account. If you are participating in prerelease programs for the first time and do not possess a prior account, then use the "New Users" section for creating a new account. You will have to provide your email address and password for creating a new Adobe Prerelease Program user account. A mail containing a link to the Prerelease program will be sent to the specified email address for verification. Use the link specified in the mail to continue with the registration process to join the Prerelease program.
I am happy to share with you all that Adobe RoboHelp 6 has won the Visual Studio Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Award. This is the first time that we released a version of RoboHelp from Adobe. You can read the complete article at
http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2007_bg/magazine/features/readerschoice/
I know I have not been very regular in blogging, but I shall try to fix that. Last couple of weeks had been very hectic. I travelled all across the globe, met customers, and attended conferences - AODC in Melbourne and STC at Minneapolis etc. When I returned back home, I had heaps of pending items to clear up. I hope I would now be able to spare some time to talk to you through my blog. I plan to cover questions which were frequently asked in the conferences, in a series of blog posts.
I would also like to thank all our customers for visiting the booth and talking to us. We did a couple of sneak peeks for Adobe RoboHelp and Adobe FrameMaker during the sessions at STC. You can read more about RoboHelp sneak peeks on the Adobe RoboHelp Forum. Shortly, we would be starting a prerelease program for the next release of Adobe RoboHelp. Please watch this space for announcements regarding the same.
One of the most interesting requests from customers at the STC Conference Minneapolis was for a migration path from Flare to RoboHelp. Clearly, some of the customers, who had migrated from RoboHelp to Flare, want to come back to RoboHelp. We understand that they are attracted by the quality of Adobe products and the direction in which RoboHelp is moving. Any doubts they had were set to rest with the sneak peek of the features under development for RoboHelp. Customers also recognize an accelerated pace of innovation from Adobe in technical communication with three products (FrameMaker, Captivate and Acrobat 3D) in different stages of the pre-release program.
We continue to evaluate the business case for offering migration utilities to Flare customers. If you are considering a migration from Flare to RoboHelp, please let us know. Your inputs are valuable.
Update - John Daigle (www.hypertexas.com, www.showmethedemo.com) has posted a free Flare to RoboHelp converter. The converter is a free download from John Daigle's site and source code is also available under Common Public License.
STC 54th Annual Conference in Minneapolis was a great success. From Adobe perspective, we had a strong presence with eight sessions on FrameMaker, RoboHelp and Captivate. Each of the sessions included technology sneak peeks for the corresponding Adobe product. The feedback from the sneak peeks has been very positive. We also had a constant stream of visitors coming over at the Adobe booth seeking more information about these products. More importantly, we had an opportunity to meet a large number of customers, experts and partners. We also had several 1:1 customer meetings to understand their requirements and collect feedback on our products.
You have most probably seen the discussion on forums and blogs on the sneak peeks. If you have any comments or suggestions, please do let me know.
I would be attending AODC being held in Melbourne.
If you are planning to attend the conference and will like to share your comments, ideas and suggestions about RoboHelp, please
mail me at amadan(at)adobe(dot)com
and I will contact you to set up a meeting with you.
This is the first time that I am posting to the team blog. To begin with, let me introduce myself.
Hello, I am Akshay Madan, Product Manager for Adobe RoboHelp and Adobe RoboHelp Server. I have been with Adobe for around seven years now. I worked for Acrobat team before taking up this responsibility.
Adobe RoboHelp 6 was released in January 2007 and we are working on the next release. This should put to rest all the fears of RoboHelp being dead and that it has got a very bright future. In Adobe RoboHelp 6, we implemented a number of new features (please refer http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/productinfo/features/ for a complete list of new features).
Surprisingly, even after a release, I still get mails and hear comments, like, RoboHelp is a legacy tool; Adobe won’t be able to support latest platforms like Microsoft Vista and blah blah. Give me a break –RoboHelp has been around for a long time and has a history. Is this what they mean by legacy? RoboHelp continues to be the market leader and has very loyal customers. It is the preferred tool for creating Help Systems and Knowledge bases. And Adobe has publicly committed to a Vista compliant release.
If you have any doubts about Adobe RoboHelp’s future or any queries around the product, I request you to write directly to me at amadan(at)adobe(dot)com.
There have been some questions on Windows Vista support. Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and Adobe RoboHelp 6 do not support Windows Vista. However, the next versions currently under development for both FrameMaker and RoboHelp will support Windows Vista.
Often in pursuit of new features, quality takes a hit. Quality is obviously the most important part of any software application. A feature delivers customer value only when it is stable and can be used consistently. I believe there are a few aspects of quality we need to pay close attention to in the context of HATs.
1. Value to the customer – A new feature must deliver incremental value to the customer. For example, at present, RoboHelp can export to FrameMaker today in two steps, (a) export the project to RTF, and (b) import the RTF into FrameMaker. For a new feature, “export to FrameMaker” to add value, it should be significantly better than this existing option.
2. Availability to all end-users – A feature should depend on only those third party products which are widely available. This is one of the main reasons why RoboHelp exports to Microsoft Word for creating PDF and not FrameMaker.
Update- Adobe RoboHelp 6 uses Acrobat Elements to create Adobe PDF. You can do that directly from RoboHelp. Word is only an intermediate step in PDF generation.
3. Ease of use – If a new feature is hard to use, the value of the feature is limited.
4. Promised vs. available set of features – There is an increasing trend of promising features in the later versions. This makes the comparison of HATs an exercise in futility. Also,a customer can use only what exists today, not what will come 12 months later.
I believe it is time to return to fundamental principle of software delivery- Quality.
In Adobe RoboHelp 6, we added a number of features for Single Sourcing. Here are a few more examples -
1. Apply Conditional tags on Table rows and columns - With improved support for conditional tags, you can now apply them on table rows and columns. And the usage is very simple, in a table, select a row or a column, right-click and apply a conditional tag. Here is an example -
2. Hyperlinks in Word and PDF export -Hyperlinks in Word and PDF export are retained as hyperlinks.
3. User defined variables - Now, you can define variables. After you insert them at the right location, you can change the value later, providing greater flexibility and control.
Besides single sourcing, we made several enhancements in Adobe RoboHelp 6. This includes command line compile. corrected - Enabling index terms to link to bookmarks inside a topic and not just a topic, already existed prior to RoboHelp 6 . This gives you better control if a particular topic spans across multiple pages and still retains the ease of use.
We continue to look for more suggestions on how to improve these capabilities in RoboHelp further.
Technical Communication is published in multiple formats, HTML, FlashHelp, WebHelp, Print, PDF, Hosted Online Help and a host of other formats. End-users of knowledge bases, documentation, regulatory notices etc. want to access information in multiple formats and single sourcing has enabled this now at a low cost.
RoboHelp is a well recognized leader in single sourcing. RoboHelp has conditional build tags with highly visual color indicators, conditional build expressions, custom structure of print documents, single source layouts and batch generation capabilities (you may want to view this article by Matthew Ellison). RoboHelp also enables you to preview the output for a specific conditional build expression (you know what you are getting).
When we started work on Adobe RoboHelp 6, it was clear to the team that we needed to further enhance this functionality. Conditional build tags for Table of Content and Indexes were identified as important new features. In addition, you can apply conditional tags to folders and to rows or columns in a table. Several enhancements have also been made to color coding for conditional text. For more details, you may want to check out an interesting article at RoboHelp Dev Center.
PDF creation was also identified as an area of major improvement. Since this was going to be the first release of RoboHelp from Adobe, it was imperative for us to improve the PDF creation. In Adobe RoboHelp 6, you can generate a PDF with hyperlinks, bookmarks and all the features you would expect from the best PDF creation tool.
The feedback on the above has been good. At the same time, there is always scope for improvement. If you have more ideas on how this can be improved, do drop in a feature enhancement request.
On 25th January, my marketing colleagues Michael and RJ hosted an eSeminar on Adobe RoboHelp 6. If you missed a chance to participate in the eSeminar, you can register and view the recorded version. Here is a link
Last week, we released Adobe RoboHelp 6. It was one of the most significant milestones for my team. This was a culmination of tremendous effort from everyone involved and connected with the product. My special thanks to Akshay (Product Manager, RoboHelp), Vivek Kumar (Engineering Manager, RoboHelp) and his team. A special thanks to our customers and community experts as well. This release would not have been possible without their support. When we started work a few months earlier, there was considerable speculation on the future of RoboHelp. When we met customers, analysts and participated in trade shows, almost everyone was pleased to know that we had a team in place and we were working on the new release.
Finally, with the release of Adobe RoboHelp 6, we have put the speculation to rest. Initial response to the product has been heartening. Customers love RoboHelp and are happy to see the first release from Adobe. The product continues to deliver its promise of an easy to use, online and embedded help authoring tool. RoboHelp 6 has enhanced import from Word, user defined variables, enhanced condition tags and so on (I don't want to list all of them, those interested can read it on RoboHelp product page on Adobe web-site). What has missed attention of some analysts is the new tools which come along with RoboHelp. These include RoboScreenCapture, upgraded RoboSourceControl (for team authoring) and Acrobat Elements (for PDF creation).
If you haven't tried the new version, you can download the free trial from http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp.
Of course we are not done yet. Vivek Kumar and his team are back to work after a short celebration. We have more challenges to overcome and I have no doubt in my mind, we will.
button. 'List for Autonumbering' dialog will popup. 
