How RoboHelp relates to FrameMaker

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
June 17, 2025
1 reply
274 views

I received this from one of my FrameMaker clients, and I am not sure how to answer it:

Also, I apologize if this is a repeat question…do you know anything about RoboHelp? I heard somewhere that it could replace FrameMaker. Is that true?

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

It's complicated, but no, RH will not replace FM.
It really depends on what output you create - long form PDFs, a book-publishing paradigm or Structured XML for use in other downstream workflows? Then FM is still your baby. Want to produce funky frameless HTML5 for websites or inclusion inside software? Then RH is the tool.
Where the complications come in is that FM content can be imported or linked into RH projects & that FM uses an earlier headless version of the RH HTML5 rendering engine inside the FM Publish module. I can anticipate that FM will "catch up" with RH's outputs sometime in the future.
Hope this helps 😊

N

nikita_1840

Participating Frequently

We are trying to work with long-form PDFs from an accessibiliy standpoint and so far the tag structures in a PDF file generated through an unstructured FM file does not meet compliance standards. We were trying to use Adobe RoboHelp as another option to import the FM files, re-map the styling manually and exporting an accessible PDF. Wanted to know if we can automate this process in some way or have FM give us better tags that meet compliance standards.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Accessibility standards like 508? According to this page - https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdf/pdf-accessibility-overview.html - FM can create compliant PDFs.
Have you raised whatever issues you're getting with FM PDFs in the FM forum? I don't recall much discussion about the issue.
I highly doubt going through RH to create PDFs will result in any better PDFs than what FM could produce.
Maybe you need to look at Structured FM to achieve whatever you're shooting for or contact the FM folks over whatever specific issues you've run it in FM.

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