RoboHelp 6 Arrives; Puts Death Rumors To Rest
Well, the “RoboHelp is Dead” crowd will be disappointed to learn that their predictions were wrong. Alas, Adobe Systems today announced the availability of RoboHelp 6, “a complete, flexible and user-friendly system to create, manage and publish software help systems, knowledge bases and documentation for desktop and Web-based applications.”
“Adobe RoboHelp 6 is a major release and a key milestone in the product’s 15-year history,” said Don Walker, senior director of product marketing and business development at Adobe. “RoboHelp 6 strongly reinforces Adobe’s commitment to the technical communications market, giving authors what they need to easily develop, manage and maintain intuitive software help systems and knowledge bases.”
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Having just begun testing RoboHelp6 I have already found the following drawbacks using FrameMaker as the source:
1. No direct import of FM files, must first save as MIF.
2. Does not correctly identify all paragaph styles and has no style mapping facility as in WebWorks. Embeds inline styles as approximation.
3. Does not import TIFF graphic files. You are prompted for an external plugin, sent to Adobe Knowledge Base search page, enter TIF-LZW (shown in RHelp prompt). Nothing found.
Thanks for your feedback. I’m just now evaluating RoboHelp, so your views are very helpful. I’m also sponsoring an Adobe RoboHelp demonstration in Indianapolis, February 9, where I will ask Adobe about their plans for the future. I expect that if there are any issues in this new version of RoboHelp they are already addressing them. Additionally, Adobe’s new application pack approach may mean there’s a FrameMaker to RoboHelp conversion application pack in the making.
Scott Abel
The Content Wrangler
Hmmm. Still no XML output, though. In the world I work in, this seems to be a no-brainer. We went to Flare when MMedia and Adobe kept saying nothing. Flare’s still a little buggy, but two things matter a lot to me; communication from the organization, and XML output.
Thanks for this article.
RoboHelp 6.0 is fantastic news for any Robohelp User. The future just gets brighter and brighter with rumours of the Robohelp 7.0 release being worked on and may be released this year. We have just upgraded and find the additional condition tag features a robosource control update the most usefull updates. Early days I guess, but at least the product seems to have a formidable future at last. Time to uninstall the trial versions of the other tools we’ve been struggling with and get on with some work!