How does Robohelp "undo" work?

Is the fix already available? It's now 2 weeks since they announced it to be available "early next week" 🙂 I'm getting better at refraining myself from pressing ctrl-z, but it stays very annoying nevertheless.

The functionality to my mind should be this.

1. Undo only works on topics that are open. I think that is the case.
2. A single click should work on the last operation only with a further click required to go to the previous change.
3. It should take the user to the location of the change, be that the current topic or another open topic OR work as Word does, only on the topic in focus.
4. If there is to be an Undo All option, it should be a separate icon. Personally I would close the topic and not click Save.
5. The undo/redo cycle would work in the same way as Word where it is based on the order of the operations.

In your case it does sound as if what you have experienced is beyond how any undo/redo should work. What I am trying to do is establish how we would like it to work.

www.grainge.org

@Peter

Functionally, it would be very unusual if ctrl-z not just undid the very last typing action but a whole session. Undoing a session should be a very deliberate action that's done either with the menu or with a complicated shortcut like cltrl-alt-shift-z. I'm fine with the function being available, but not as regular undo.

In this case, the bug is that also the redo doesn't work. It doesn't redo everything it undid. I haven't tested this extensively but I think it only redoes the last edit and leaves alone all the other stuff it undid to go back to the last session. This makes it impossible to determine exactly what it redid which leaves your topic in such a mess that the only sensible option is to close without saving and open the topic again. Which can lose hours of work if you depended on autosave for hours. And that's only if it just undid the session of the topic you had open. I have no idea what it did to my other topics, if anything. I have seen content in other topics randomly disappear, which I needed to copy over again from previously compiled versions. No idea if that had to do with this bug or with myself, but it feels a bit discomforting.

I think RH already goes back to the location it redoes something (at least I can't remember anything strange in that regard before 0.10). However, if it would redo a whole session going back to multiple locations in the same topic simultaneously would be impossible. 🙂

One of the reasons for the change is that a new tool is being used to develop RoboHelp and changes that took weeks before now take days or even hours.

www.grainge.org

So the issue is not so much that it goes beyond the last Save but even before you Save, you could be undoing things you didn't mean to because you don't get taken to its location. Correct?

If the screen jumped to the location each time you clicked Undo/Redo during the time the topic is open, would that work for everyone?

In Word if you type something on say Page 2, then go to the top of Page 1 and click CTRL Z, you get taken back to the location on Page 2 where you made the change.

I know Word does not go beyond the last Save but I'm not seeing that as the problem, rather not knowing what is being undone/redone is the dangerous bit. Agree/disagree?

www.grainge.org

The bug tracker now shows "This issue has been resolved and shall be made available early next week. We are sorry for the trouble."

While I feel like I'm a bit of a beta tester with the new UI, I'm impressed by the resolve and quick responses of Adobe when something is wrong. Kudos to them, it makes me stick to the new UI regardless of the inconveniences.

I now have access to a RoboHelp machine again and the undo/redo is not per session. It is while that topic remains open. Close a topic and reopen it and the undo/redo function no longer operates on the previous changes. It is thus quite easy to force it to work the old way.

SnagIt also works that way and I have been grateful for it on more than one occasion. Perhaps a user setting to allow either way of working would keep us all happy.

StudioSM.

You say

I have been working on this RoboHelp project the last week now. And this just happened: I have a document with a large table and saves and closes the document regularly. I copied a wrong text into a cell. Hit undo and an entire earlier version of the document appears. A version several "Saves" ago.

Is that something you can replicate as that definitely isn't OK.

www.grainge.org

I'd suggest that the more common practice in the software world (and thus, expectation) is that undo/redo functions perform per edit, not per session. In fact, this is how they function in RH2017. Additionally, even if the RH2019 undo function is designed "per session", the redo function does not "redo" all "per session" changes after un-doing all such changes. I've lost hours of work due to this issue, as a result. For now, I've trained myself to avoid the undo/redo functions. Hoping Adobe agrees with my view of the issue and resolves it in the next update.

Pretty sure it's Undo per session which I have seen elsewhere. It can be useful as long as you are aware.

You can vote for the bug here:

https://tracker.adobe.com/