When Adobe acquired Macromedia last year, they noticed that RoboHelp—a "best of breed" application and market leader—had not been updated for a long time. Clearly there was an opportunity to revitalize this venerable tool. After all, since 1992 thousands of authors around the world have used RoboHelp every day to create online help systems and knowledge bases viewed by hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of users.

In fact, WritersUA recently published its annual survey of authoring tools used by technical writers. The survey showed that RoboHelp "…continues to dominate the Help authoring space with nearly two-thirds of the respondents using one or more versions of the popular Adobe product."

Adobe also identified an emerging technical communications solution made up of Adobe Acrobat, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Captivate, and of course Adobe RoboHelp.

So, back in April 2006, eight members of the new Adobe RoboHelp 6 product management, product marketing, and product engineering team traveled to the annual WritersUA conference to interview longtime RoboHelp users. This "listening tour" continued with a trip to the Society for Technical Communications convention in May, followed by trips to STC regional meetings in Boston, Dallas, and then to England and Germany for more conferences.

The idea was to listen carefully to real users who wanted to make sure that as Adobe made improvements, they didn't get rid of essential features. Some were worried that they might have to learn a radically new interface—one that might not be as friendly as RoboHelp's built-in, WYSIWYG editor. These authors said, "Keep our user-friendly interface. We're writers first, coders second."

That didn't mean they didn't want more features, however. Just nine months later, Adobe has delivered Adobe RoboHelp 6 with plenty of improvements and many new features. Here's a rundown of many of them.

More powerful single sourcing: One project, many audiences

RoboHelp is known for making it easy to generate different outputs for different audiences. The single-source layouts are enhanced with these features:

Using better conditional build tags for TOC and index keywords

Perhaps you have topics that are fine for the online web version but they don't work in the printed version. Maybe the human resources department has privacy concerns and some topics should be confidential. Other topics may be "under construction." The solution to manage these situations is conditional build tags.

Now you can drag and drop to assign these tags to whole topics or parts of a topic. Tags are now much easier to manage because of a new report feature that lets you know exactly where the tags have been applied. Along with color-coded shading, this reduces the mystery of what has been tagged or not. You can even apply a build tag to an entire folder at once.

Also new is the ability to assign tags to books in a TOC or to index keywords and sub-keywords. Read more about using this feature in Using the Conditional Build Tags feature in RoboHelp HTML 6.

Customizing content with user-defined variables

Change once, change everywhere. Often there are company names, brand names, copyright statements, and other "boilerplate" chunks of text that sometimes change over the course of project development. Now an author can create a user-defined variable that can incorporate text changes without having to locate every topic and update it.

Keeping with the single-source concept, these variables can be applied to single-source layouts at the last minute when the project is being generated on the fly. You can read more about using this feature in the RoboHelp documentation and in a future article in the RoboHelp Developer Center.

Using a command line to generate single-source layouts

For efficiency, command-line generation as been added so that scripts can be created to build single-source layouts in a automated way without launching RoboHelp. Now you can create a batch script timed to generate to a specific location at a scheduled time, unattended.

RoboSource Control 3: Multiple authors no longer fighting over files

One strong trend that continues is the growth of team-authoring. Multiple authors may need to make updates on the same project. RoboHelp 6 builds on the innovation of RoboSource Control. As always, there is the integration with third-party version control systems as well.

A totally new source and version control system makes it much easier to share your projects with other authors as you check in and check out files. RoboSource Control 3 uses the robust SQL Server or MSDE for its database. It is also compatible with third-party systems such as Visual SourceSafe. You don't have to "go outside" RoboHelp to perform source control functions. It's all integrated with the RoboHelp interface. This content management system allows teams of authors to time- and date-stamp work, keep a history of various files, and roll back to a previous version. Read more about using this feature in Getting Started with RoboSource Control 3 in RoboHelp 6 .

RoboHelp Server 6: Answers to "Am I being helpful?"

RoboHelp authors are champions of the user. They have long wanted to know what their users find useful: What topics do they search for? Are they getting the results they want? The new RoboHelp Server 6 (formerly RoboEngine) will build on RoboHelp's reputation for innovation. This optional server-based help system will have the ability to search Microsoft Office and Acrobat PDF text and generate customized user feedback reports. Some of the reports will identify frequently viewed content, usage statistics, search trends, and areas requiring help.

Also new is FlashHelp Pro, a single-source layout that was not previously available to those using the server-based help format.

A new web-based remote interface will make it easy for web administrators to modify configuration settings in RoboHelp Server 6. RoboHelp Server 6 will be available very soon.

Improvements to Microsoft Word import/export

Often subject matter experts provide Microsoft Word documents to technical writers for conversion to HTML. Because of the complexity of the code generated by Word's conversion process, style formatting can offer challenges. To help with this, Adobe RoboHelp 6 provides better import handling of bulleted and numbered lists, which makes it easier to edit after the conversion.

Also enhanced is the creation of printed documentation. Whether generated as Word or as an Acrobat PDF, the document retains live links to bookmarks and other hyperlinks.

New Adobe Acrobat Elements

Many authors want to generate Acrobat PDF documents from within RoboHelp. Now with Acrobat Elements and one click, you can generate a PDF that retains hyperlinks, adds accessibility, converts headings to bookmarks, and provides a rich set of security settings.

RoboScreenCapture: Versatile graphics editor

RoboScreenCapture is not only a great capturing tool but a versatile graphics editor that saves in 20 formats and adds attractive drop shadows and shape effects. Editing is close at hand. If there is a graphic in the visual editor that you need to tweak, you only need to right-click it and choose Edit with RoboScreenCapture to take care of it quickly.

Bringing topics to life with Adobe Captivate tutorials

Many RoboHelp authors use animated simulations and e-learning movies to enhance their projects. You can import an existing Adobe Captivate movie into your project or, if you have it installed, start a session right from within RoboHelp 6.

In addition to these highlights, there are many other features to help keep your RoboHelp projects compatible. Check it out and see; this is just the beginning. Adobe continues to develop and support RoboHelp and wants to hear from you. Tell us how we can continue to improve RoboHelp. Visit the RoboHelp Developer Center to learn more about using RoboHelp 6.

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