Confused about which product to use

Hi, OISSander and welcome to the forums.

Peter Grainge is the forum expert on Printed Documentation and he will no doubt chime in when he wakes up on the UK side of the pond.

Meanwhile, I would offer that RoboHelp 8 does add more flexibility by offering you a new option of selecting a different CSS for generating a Word document for mapping styles (though I think Peter prefers spending more time on the Word document template). Peter's site offers many good suggestions, though I don't know if it has been updated for RoboHelp 8?

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/printing/printing.htm

His main suggestion is to spend more time up front by modifying the StyleMapping.dot (provided by RoboHelp) to try and provide the best mapping of your project's CSS styles to Word styles. By testing and tweaking beforehand, the results will be more satisfactory. For many authors, this meets or exceeds their requirements.

However, Word itself has limitations (ugh) and will never be a true desktop publishing application. For this, you may want to look at Adobe FrameMaker instead of Adobe InDesign because it is already part of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite and there is a specific workflow for linking FrameMaker and RoboHelp so that FrameMaker controls the print output for maximum control and RoboHelp is used for the online output. Another consideration is whether the benefits of a full blown desktop publishing application (like InDesign) are worth the learning curve time.

Finally, since you seem to be a Word-centric shop, a new feature in RoboHelp 8 is the ability to *link* Word documents (vs. importing). So, for example, if a subject matter expert is authoring a Word doc, instead of importing the document each time, you merely "update" the linked document to update the topics.

If there is something specific about what you weren't happy about with the previous version's printed documentation, let us know and perhaps we can offer more suggestions.

Thanks
John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

www.showmethedemo.com