RoboHelp Future and Support

If I were a newcomer to this forum, I might get the sense that some old-timers are taking a somewhat defensive attitude.

As an RH user of more than 5 years (I know, some colleagues go back several years more), I'd like to respond: "Stop whining! You should see the way it used to be!"

By the way, did anyone here ever use WordPerfect or MS Word in the early days?

But I digress. I know it's not easy to accept shortcomings, and there's no reason we shouldn't expect better.

We've had lots of discussion here, and it appears most of us agree that RH needs some serious work in several areas:

--Table editing and manipulation.
--Importing Word documents and stripping out the gobbledygook tags. (This was a big part of the antitrust complaint against MS: They were building in a lot of MS-specific stuff that didn't help and, in fact, interfered with rival applications.)
--Exporting to print formats.
--Accommodating alternative browsers that, for some strange reason, were following html standards in a way that is less forgiving of code variants than IE permits.
--Improved handling of merged projects. (Remember when we couldn't merge projects at all? Ooops, there I go again.)
--An overhaul of the RH "Truecode" structure that stuffs project topics with tags that help the WYSIWYG display but must be stripped on output.

As Tyler said, that's top-of-the-head thinking.

Fraternally,

Harvey

Hi,
I am currently using trial version, the official one (Office) should arrive any moment now.

Some observations (may be false, I am happy to get corrected):

1. May be due to MS-Word, but importing Word documents is not reliable. Topics don't get created, images do not appear in the list of images, behaviour may be different on different imports (as I said, might be due to Word, 2003 in my case).
2. Handling multiple items at one time is impossible, be it topics, TOC, import dialogs. Should be added.
3. At least with RH for Word, when importing documents, images being in perfectly valid format for HTML (i.e. .png) do get converted to bitmaps (the quality goes way down). If one does not do the conversion, images do not appear at all in the image list.
3. The size of images, to add an item about images, ought to be imported with the size set in Word. Now, the original size is used, and unnecessary time goes to resizing.
4. There should be a way to "clean" the project. If I import the same document again, all images are duplicated for no reason.
5. If I close a document, it shouldn't be opened automatically. This happens once in a while, especially when importing documents. And if documents may be opened automatically, they could be closed automatically, too (with confirmation, naturally). Closing a document is required to delete it from the project. It is a nuisance to do it manually every time.
6. A refresh should be possible. Currently if one adds topics, a totally new TOC must be created and the added topics have to picked up manually.

Wohoo !

This post has totally made my day. I've been working with RoboHelp a little over a year and was disgusted to hear that Macromedia decided to sunset it. I just want to say " Thank You " to Adobe for keeping the best-damn help authoring tool around for more updates.... you guys may suck sometimes when it comes to support, but you're in my good books now.

As for requests for product updates, I'm going to say: Fix the bugs.
How ironic that I've had to write a guide in robohelp covering how to use robohelp and all the bugs and quirks i've noticed.

Short list:
1 - PNG Files causing crashes. If saved once and only once in Paint, will cause an application error. Saving twice fixes it

2 - Tracked Changes in word -- I just posted this one earlier today, but robohelp doesn't deal with word tracked changes very well

Then there's the "won't make robohelp crash, but is hard to work with list",

1 - General word imports -- being forced to change all the bullets and numbers to correct "bullets" and "numbers" is a bit frustrating

2 - Better Merged Project support - The ability to link to and and from merged projects would be STELLAR... currently you need to use ../../../../ etc.etc.etc it's rediculous, and you never know if you got it wrong until there's a 404.

3 - More customization for Printed Documentation, such as headers & footers and maybe the ability to make a fancy title page... I'm weary of creating printed documentation because i need to spend an hour formatting to our standards.

4 - Better Table support. Copying rows, columns & cells, currently unsupported. You can copy a full table, but not rows/columns or cells.... Also I'd like to see more word-esque table support, i.e. "Insert column to the right/left", "Insert rows above/below"

5 - Import XLS files.... I've had many headaches trying to do this.

Hmm... that was just off the top of my head..

I wish Adobe all the best for the 2007 version of RoboHelp -- I hope it blows the competition out of the water
( and isn't too expensive to upgrade )

-Tyler Waters

Hello Susan,

I have reviewed your case and followed up via email. If you need further clarification, please fee free to reply to the email.

Thank you,

Bobby W
Support Research Specialist
Technical Support
Adobe Systems Incorporated

It took about three weeks to find out that Alaska was no longer eligible to participate in a support plan (ours had lapsed) and it was necessary to contact Adobe Customer Service directly. After researching online Help, I tried to do so by phone but was unsuccessful. Then in early June, I sent an email (support ticket #8568458). I received a reply that didn't really answer my question. Either my question was worded poorly or I didn't understand the answer, entirely possible on both counts!

Shane,

I just joined the forum and am glad to see this topic posted. I work in an area that is no longer offered a support plan. Direct contact with "Adobe support" has proven time-consuming and unsatisfactory. Will Adobe offer increased support along with the new release?

Thanks

Hi Shane,

I'm glad to hear that RoboHelp users will get more support. I am currently looking into purchasing RoboHelp and have not been able to get answers to my questions going through your sales or support. I've had an open case for about a week or two. My case number is 4377465. I've spoken to a couple of salespeople who told me I couldn't get my questions answered because I didn't have a support plan (I was trying to get the trial version to work so I could make the pitch to my management) and then they said they would try, but I never got any results.

I also tried your online help. It was no help at all. I followed the steps for several issues only to have them not work. I probably will purchase RoboHelp but only because of the forums that are available. That is where I've been able to find the answers to my questions.

I'm converting from FrameMaker, so it is disappointing that RoboHelp for FrameMaker is no longer available.

Thank you for the update.

Hi Shane,

Do you have any idea whether the next release of RoboHelp will support double-byte character sets? My company is currently trying to localize our product for several asian languages and so this is critical for us. I know that a version of RoboHelp (X3 I believe) used to exist for asian languages, but no longer does. If no asian language support is planned for the next version of RoboHelp, we will probably switch to a different help authoring tool. Anyway word you could give us on this would be much appreciated.

Hughes

Thanks Shane!

Great to hear something from Adobe about RoboHelp. Teaching and selling RoboHelp to my customers will be a lot simpler from now on. Hopefully this will also take care of Adobe officials (at least in Sweden) not knowing what RoboHelp is...

/Pelle

Welcome to the RoboHelp Forum, Shane!
Glad to hear support issues are being clarified. As one who teaches RoboHelp, Captivate and Breeze, the information will go a long way to filling in the rumor and information gaps.
Thanx,
john