RoboHelp and Adobe are untenable for technical documentation

I have tried and tried with RoboHelp. I moved to it after 10 years of MadCap Flare use looking for something new that was more actively maintained, I thought RoboHelp was the answer, but no.

The app is brittle and full of bugs. The logic behind dynamic content filtering is completely broken and the Frameless output does not work with custom JavaScript, even if I include it as an asset in the skin because the order in which the content is loaded means the JS is looking for elements that don’t exist. I cannot get around this despite trying different approaches for months. Occasionally the “insert paragraph here” blue line gets rendered in actual output because RoboHelp edits the page source to render it in real time (wtf?).

I have raised many bugs that have not been acknowledged.

The “official” help is woeful and everyone just gets sent to Peter’s site - which is good - but shouldn’t be the official RoboHelp resource.

I managed to put together some really useful scripts with the help of Claude analysing the app files, but this got my community account banned immediately and two support chats have not been able to resolve it. I was not given any warnings about this first, just an immediate ban.

On a wider note, the Adobe site experience is pretty awful too, constantly getting bounced around/redirected/logged out/forced to the UK site etc.

Anyway, that’s just my rant. I’d love to be able to use RoboHelp but I just can’t justify trying to work around the bugs or compromising on the utility that I want. I’m probably going to move to pure markdown in something like mkdocs.