Lots of goodies seen at the Adobe RoboHelp STC sneak peeks

Question

In three different sessions at the STC conference in
Minneapolis I saw pre-beta demonstrations of RoboHelp "next".
Certainly there's a mind-boggling number of new features. But more
than that, Adobe has spent a lot of time listening to authors about
ways to make their workflow easier. The presentations were made by
Akshay Madan, Adobe Product Manager for RoboHelp. He and his team
have obviously been busy! Here's a recap:
1. What struck me right away was a multiple document
interface (MDI). You can work nicely among any number of topics
that are open and displayed in tabs. I'm glad to see that they are
not planning to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The popular
and friendly Word-like WYSIWYG editor is still central to the main
work area. You still feel like a writer and not a coder (no offense
to programmers).
2. At the same time, the UI is more modern and cleanly laid
out. There are also customizeable toolbars and "pods" that can be
moved around and configured the way the author works. These
configurations can be given a name so for example, an author can
have a layout for authoring sessions and one for editing sessions.
3. These movable panels or pods are handy, but I also like
that you can quickly return to "factory defaults" in case the
layout becomes too fragmented.
4. No <kadov> tags! These much-maligned tags are often
used by competitors to bad-mouth RoboHelp. Well, they'll have to
come up with something else because I saw nice clean,
color-customizable code behind the WYSIWYG editor.
5. There is also Unicode and double-byte support for
something like 34 different languages including Asian and Eastern
European characters.
6. For single sourcing, the author can create multiple TOCs
and name them so that they are easy to use when generating output
for different audiences (or for print vs. online).
7. Help for translators: Because of MDI, a translator can
have an English topic open in a pane side-by-side with a Japanese
topic for easier comparison and editing. Languages can also be
mixed. So, I can have Japanese, Greek or any number of words or
phrases mixed within a topic. The same is true for the TOC, Index
of keywords or Glossary of terms and definitions.
8. Snippets of HTML code make it easy to have chunks of text
and graphics saved for re-use. For example a logo graphic and
copyright statement can be saved and placed in multiple topics. If
you change the logo or text in the snippet, the changes are
populated wherever the snippet has been placed (kind of like
RoboHelp 6's User Defined Variables on steroids).
9. Breadcrumbs offer a nice touch for the user experience
with links that show the user where they are in the heirarchy of
topics.
10. Searching in WebHelp/Flashhelp: When searching, the "hit"
terms are highlighted in a color of the author's choosing. This can
easily be turned off by the user as well.
11. Much improved Framemaker MIF support. Matthew Stern was
at STC and was impressed. "You can import a MIF file directly into
RoboHelp and everything is retained: variables, graphics (including
Flash and Acrobat 3D files), and conditional text."
12. There is support for MS Vista and Office 2007 including
the new XML-based .docx format, (though this was not yet enabled in
the pre-alpha build I saw.)
13. Better Screen capture manipulation within topics.
14. Adobe representatives also said there would be news
posted on the
Adobe TechComm Blog
with invitations to sign up for the beta program when it gets
underway.
After using RoboHelp since 1992, I get caught up in the
feature race like everyone else. But, as Vivek Jain, Group Product
Manager for RoboHelp said, features are not the only thing that
define innovation. Rather he says, "Quality is innovation."
This should put a rest to the "RoboHelp is dead" garbage.
As a user and instructor since 1992 it was very satisfying
and exciting to see these sneak peeks and that Adobe is not only
bringing RoboHelp back to life, but making it a central piece of
the suite of applications that make up the Technical Communications
(RoboHelp, Framemaker, Captivate and Acrobat).
Sneaks peeks were also shown for Adobe Framemaker 8 and Adobe
Captivate 3 as well. The sneak peeks were introduced with the usual
caveats, such as,“The features presented during the
Technology Sneak peek contain proof of concept features and
features in the development pipeline. They are not final for the
next release however we want to take this opportunity to show the
general direction of where we are taking the products.” They
also mentioned that while they cannot comment about release dates,
they "expect to see new releases this year." However, from what I
saw, this pre-alpha build looked stable and rich with the
functionality I've outlined.
It's an exciting time for technical communicators!
John
Evergreen Online Learning, LLC
Evergreen, Colorado

Answer 1

Hi all,
That certainly looks like a promising list of possible
enhancements. :-)
I've been putting off switching to Flare for a few reasons
(for me, the user friendliness of the editor doesn't appeal) and
have been hoping that Adobe would pick up on RoboHelp and develop
it further.
RoboHelp's ease of use just seems to allow me to concentrate
more on creating content and that has always been its major
advantage.
Maybe I'm just getting lazy, and I know all software has its
foibles, but spending time fighting with an editor to get the
output to look and behave how I want is not where I want to be.
Even the great RoboHelp kadov debate doesn't bother me so long as
the output works, but, if they can get rid of proprietary tags so
the code is more compliant - brilliant.
The X6 release came across as a first step but not
necessarily a needed upgrade - the stuff they're talking about for
the next release looks much more promising, and definitely feels
like a reason to hang on with RoboHelp a while longer.
By the way, does anyone know if the X6 version still strips
out meta tags from source when you produce output files? The
feature list of X6 didn't prompt me to upgrade immediately, but X5
gives me a world of hurts with metatags, and that could actually be
something that could get me to shell out some dosh for the X6
version rather than wait for what looks like a major new release.
Sorry for being lazy and not installing the trial to see, but
I'm a bit tight on project time so if anyone knows I'd really
appreciate it. Thanks.
PS - something that made me laugh out loud this morning:
"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."
http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/robohelp
The MadCap people seem very helpful, but some of their
marketing comes across as too pushy, so that blog really made me
smile. Maybe Adobe are almost 'too'big', but with the new release
talk, it looks like things might be about to get interesting again.
Cheers
Karl