A Review of RoboHelp Office 2002
Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4
By Matthew Ellison
When you develop a new version of a software application, it’s tempting to update the Help by simply adding in a few topics to cover the new features and tweaking the content of other topics where necessary. The Help authors at eHelp might have been excused for taking this easy option for the 2002 release, because the basic functionality of the product has remained largely unchanged. However, to their credit they've opted for a fairly radical overhaul of the Help for RoboHelp HTML Edition.
The most obvious change is a much-needed reorganization of the table of contents. The hierarchy has been made less flat by moving the books "RoboHelp Authoring Environment" and "Help-authoring Basics" (which were at the top level in version 9) into the Getting Started book. This is a sensible change. However, following the Getting Started book there is rather a strange sequence of books arranged alphabetically so that "Browse sequences" and "Dynamic HTML and special effects" appear far higher up the bill than "Tables of contents" and "Topics." Since new users often explore the table of contents by working downward through the sequence of books, it’s possible that the users could gain the false impression that adding a Spiral Transition is a more fundamental task than creating a new topic!
The Help authors have done a good job of cleaning up the index—gone is the keyword "Adding" with its interminable list of sub-keywords. The online tutorial has been rewritten—an effort I applaud wholeheartedly, because I know how easy it would have been simply to tinker with the old one to include the new features. eHelp is clearly taking the issue of user assistance for its own products seriously, which is a good example for a Help authoring tool vendor to be setting!
But of all the changes to the Help system, the one that I most welcome is that I no longer have to wait for "The Industry Standard in Help Development™" to fade in on the opening topic. Whether it was just a strange illusion or not, it always seemed to take longer to appear when I was in a hurry. And it always felt kind of impolite to select another topic from the index until the slogan has fully completed its slow materialization—if you used the Help for RoboHelp HTML 9, maybe you felt the same way. I should tell you that the opening topic for the Help in the 2002 version is not transition-free: a new maxim ("The Worldwide Leader in Automated User Assistance Software") now flies in smartly from the right when you open the Help. However, it seems to have completed its short journey even before the Browse toolbar appears, so I don’t gain the same impression of being unnecessarily delayed.
EHelp has put a lot of work into the WYSIWYG editor since the first release of RoboHTML 1.0, and it now does a good job of representing fairly faithfully what the user will see. Don’t expect the underlying HTML that it produces to have changed much in the transition from RoboHelp 9 to 2002, though. There are still plenty of those mysterious "kadov" tags lurking around your code.
There’s something I’d really like to be able to do in the WYSIWYG Editor that (as far as I can tell) I still can’t do in the 2002 version: I’d like to easily remove all manual formatting from a paragraph, and return it to the format defined with the style for that paragraph. In Word, I can doing this by pressing Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+Spacebar (if you didn’t know that, then you’ve just learned something really useful by persevering with this article!). If anyone knows an equivalent shortcut in RoboHelp, I’d be glad to hear from him or her.
There’s one little glitch I’ve found in RoboHelp HTML 2002. If I select some text in the WYSIWYG Editor and then switch to TrueCode view, the same text is not accurately highlighted. This is a slight regression from version 9, which faithfully retained the correct highlighting when switching between views.
Despite my reference to the occasional minor shortcoming, my overall impression of the 2002 release of RoboHelp Office is a favorable one. eHelp has consolidated this mature and well-established tool by leaving its UI and basic functionality more or less unchanged, but has added a number of important new features that could save many Help authors a lot of time and effort. Chief amongst these are Topic Templates and the new Import functionality, which enable you to bring in content from Word or from FrameMaker. The Skins feature will, I’m sure, prove popular amongst those authors needing to provide their Help window with a distinct brand image.
For more information about RoboHelp Office 2002, visit the eHelp web site .
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