Monday, March 14, 2011

Adobe RoboHelp 9: A Fresh Look

Decided to drop in on this session, in part because of a couple of recommendations of friends suggested it would be useful in job hunting. Thing is, I've not worked at a place that used RoboHelp in years and years. So it will be interesting to see what's now.

Kevin Siegel, of IconLogic, is the presenter.

He began by showing how RoboHelp can output an ePub document. Need a TOC, otherwise, the TOC in the ePub will be skipped. Also, need a reader on your computer so you can see how it will look. Indexes are not supported in ePub.

Don't use dynamic effects in source, or comment them out, because they don't work in ePub.

When creating output, especially webhelp, definitely need to test in multiple browsers. Can test browsers from within RoboHelp, but support for Google Chrome seems to be problematic, and some metrics are suggesting Chrome is reaching 20% of web users.

User-centric help systems allow you to conditionalize content and then let users select the subset of content they want to see.

Now he's getting into how to have reviewers comment on PDF files. But in RoboHelp, a feature is to import comments from a PDF file.

If you're using the whole Technical Communication Suite, RoboHelp becomes a "bit player" in the process, which is centralized around FrameMaker.

RoboHelp 9 adds the ability to add external searches.

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