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.

RoboHelp HTML’s major advances are Vista, Unicode and Framemaker support

Once you’ve imported or roughed out your topics, RoboHelp lets you enhance them by adding tables, hyperlinks, references and so on. You can also add graphical elements and RoboHelp 7 now lets you directly add screenshots taken with its dedicated – though again dated – RoboScreenCapture utility as well as Flash-based demonstrations and assessments produced with Captivate 3, another element in the Technical Communications Suite. You can also get directly to grips with your topics’ underlying code by switching to HTML view. RoboHelp HTML now produces cleaner code without the proprietary kadov tags and the editor now offers improved customisation and basic Intellisense-based help regarding tags and styles as you type. You can also now save re-usable blocks of code as snippets.
As well as preparing your topics, you need to take care of navigation. As you’d expect RoboHelp makes it relatively straightforward to create a table of contents (TOC), index and glossary. The big difference in this version is that the relevant editors have been reworked to let you create multiple TOCs, indexes and glossaries in the same project which is pretty much essential when simultaneously dealing with multiple languages.
When you’ve sorted out both topics and navigation, you’re ready to publish. RoboHelp supports a wide range of online help formats including JavaHelp, OracleHelp and Microsoft HTML Help. However these days the preferred standards are WebHelp and FlashHelp both of which can be integrated with the separate RoboHelp Server for additional functionality such as user tracking. These preferred browser-based formats also now provide support for synonym-based search, keyword highlighting and breadcrumb links which all help your end users get to the information they are looking for more quickly and give your projects a little bit of professional polish in the process. As well as publishing for online browsing you can also export documentation for print either directly to PDF or, more usefully, to Word DOC and now DOCX format which enables greater design control. However the lack of Framemaker FM export, let alone round-tripping, is disappointing.
After the recent concerns over RoboHelp’s future, existing users will be reassured to see that this latest release’s new support for Vista, Word 2007, IP6 and Unicode provides the secure platform necessary for continuing development – and their loyalty is rewarded with a low upgrade price from version 6. With the new integration with the Technical Communication Suite, users can even be cautiously optimistic about Adobe’s commitment and the longer term. However, after a long period of neglect, RoboHelp is overpriced and still has a lot of catching up to do.

EASE OF USE 3/6
FEATURES 4/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 2/6
OVERALL 3/6