An enhanced interface and support for Framemaker and multiple languages help give RoboHelp a new lease of life.

At one time producing online help was generally treated as an afterthought to the software development process and usually knocked up in Word using a few macros and Microsoft’s free compiler...

Eventually the importance of producing and maintaining high quality HTML-based help dawned and, with it, the need for dedicated tools – and eHelp’s RoboHelp emerged as the market leader. However the program suffered when Macromedia took over the company – it was more interested in the Flash-based Captivate – and the future looked uncertain. Now Adobe is in charge and promoting RoboHelp once again, both as a standalone and as a core element of its new Technical Communication Suite (see review).
However RoboHelp’s long and chequered history still casts a long shadow. This is immediately evident in the inclusion of the RoboHelp for Word module which still uses the Microsoft program as its authoring environment. The module has now been updated to support Word 2007 and the level of power it manages to provide within an external host is impressive. Even so, it’s a real criticism of RoboHelp that anyone should be tempted to use a glorified Word add-on for authoring rather than its own dedicated environment.

RoboHelp for Word has been updated but few will want to use it

Thankfully the main RoboHelp HTML application has also been given a major interface overhaul including new support for customisable menus and keyboard shortcuts. However the program still feels at least five years behind the times as Adobe has bizarrely chosen to copy the look-and-feel of Microsoft Office 2003 applications right down to the new - and infuriating - menus which drop off rarely-used commands. Far more useful is the introduction – not before time - of a multiple document interface which presents multiple open topics as tabs. The new environment is certainly an improvement but it’s hardly a model of streamlined modern efficiency.
Which means that many users will still want to begin authoring the text for their help systems externally. Here the new support for Word 2007 DOCX files is important. Even more so is the greatly enhanced support for Framemaker. This includes the ability to add multiple FM and BOOK files directly or by reference, to map styles and re-use mappings, to convert styles to HTML lists, to apply custom HTML tags to styles, to ignore numbering and so on. Most importantly, RoboHelp HTML now supports Framemaker conditional build tags and user-defined variables. Taken together with the core new Unicode support and the wide range of language dictionaries in both the latest Framemaker and RoboHelp, this means that the two applications can now work together handling multiple languages, multiple versions and multiple outputs all from a single source file.