RH for W vs RH HTML

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Originally posted by: AcolinFlood
Because the GUI of Word is so familiar, using RoboHelp for Word is tempting. Are there any limitations or benefits of one RoboHelp version over the other?

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I'm going to be the heretic here and say that I avoid RoboHelp HTML in favour of RoboHelp Word. Some of the things that irritated me intensely about RoboHelp HTML (in version 5, and these don't seem to have been changed in Version 7 which I upgraded to only a couple of weeks back) are:
- You still don't seem to be able to assign shortcut keys to your preferred styles. This is something that I use extensively in Word;
- You can't "cascade" styles in the sense that you can in Word, where you can for example have (say) Body Text defined a particular way, then (say) Quotation Block defined as Body Text + other attributes thus allowing you to change the style at the top of the tree and have the changes flow down. (I'm aware that .css's work differently to Word templates, but nonetheless it wouldn't be a bad idea for RoboHelp to implement something like this in the background.)
- Obviously you don't have VBA to implement automatic creation of (for example) tables and so on.
- Moving between the two environments is annoying because RoboHelp HTML style names don't allow spaces (you can't define a style called "Body Text", for example) while many built-in Word styles DO use spaces. (I agree that spaces aren't ideal as part of object names, but it annoys me even more that RoboHelp HTML is prepared to breach this convention for its own built-in styles of Heading 1 to Heading 6; it simply won't let YOU define a style with spaces in its name.)
- There were a few other things that annoyed me about RoboHelp HTML compared to Word as well, but it's been too long since I made the choice of Word over HTML for me to recall what they were just at the minute. However the core of it was that I just find Word to be a vastly superior editing environment.

However, you have to bear in mind that my intention is to produce output in multiple formats, not just HTML. If I were to be producing HTML help files only, I'd probably bite the bullet and put up with the shortcomings of the HTML environment simply because it would be the price to pay for getting better quality output.

For example, my Word bullet styles don't work properly when the output format is HTML. (They appear as the number 1 instead of as the bullet symbol that I've chosen.) This is a small price to pay, IMHO. However if I were producing something like the Clownfish example in RoboHelp 7, I really doubt that it could be done effectively in Word.

(Not that I would, because many corporate environment browsers are locked down so tightly these days that it would be a pain to get something as flashy as that to run. I'm therefore speaking hypothetically here.)

I'm not saying "Word rox, HTML is for lusers" or any such fanboi nonsense; simply that both have advantages AND disadvantages and for me, Word's advantages outweigh HTML's.

You sure can start in RH for Word and convert to HTML, provided you enjoy all the little problems caused by importing from Word. Please read Rick's first paragraph again.

It will not necessarily fail and a lot will depend on how well the Word document was created. There's a topic on importing on my site but unless you have to import stuff other people have produced, I would use RH HTML. There's also a lot more support here for it.

thanks, did not get an email with this answer! So the major difference is the HTML editing of RH verus the ease of word editing of RH for Word? Can't I start a project in one, when I am creating the doc and edit the project in RH for HTML later?

Hi Colin

Hands down, avoid Word and use RoboHelp HTML if you are creating anything HTML based. I cannot tell you the number of posts I've seen in these forums where users are whinging because they can't easily change some aspect of HTML based help for this reason.

It's also worth noting that should you look for training, training in RoboHelp for Word is non-existent.

The bottom line is that Word was created from the onset to create printed output. HTML was an afterthought. A kludge. If you are creating HTML based output, stick with an HTML based editor! The interface is very "Word like".

Trust me, you will be happier in the end.

Cheers... Rick