Link Captivate .swfs in RoboHelp?

[Phil_EH]

Using Tech Comm Suite - Can a Captivate generated .swf be linked to Robohelp so that Robohelp sees the updated version? Or is it necessary to reimport the .swf to Robohelp? I'm not clear on how these two products integrate.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Esch

The only way any sort of "dynamic" (if you will) link like that can happen would be if you elected to publish your Captivate output directly to a RoboHelp HTML folder. If you did this, when you published the new Captivate version, the RoboHelp would be "updated" by virtue of having the latest file present. Then you would simply create output from RoboHelp to have updates included.

Hopefully this helps... Rick

[Phil_EH]

Thanks Rick that makes a lot of sense. It makes me wonder though if the Tech Comm Suite has any real "integration" between RH and Captivate. My impression is that the integration is more between FrameMaker (which we don't use) and RH.

[RoboWizard]

Hi again Esch

Well, there is a bit of "integration" that exists between RoboHelp and Captivate. But to be honest, I believe it existed before the Tech Comms Suite was available.

Personally, I'd never even think of using the two products in this manner, but here is how it works:

You are working along in RoboHelp and WHAP! It suddenly dawns on you that a Captivate movie would be just dandy here. So, from right inside RoboHelp, you click File > New > Adobe Captivate Demo. Then Captivate opens in an odd mode and you may record what you want. You stop recording, publish the output and save it and the result is placed where your cursor was in the topic in RoboHelp before you launched Captivate.

So there you have it. Ta daaaa! Integration!

Cheers... Rick

[JainVivek]

You can select a Captivate demo in RoboHelp and select to edit that in Captivate. RoboHelp will minimize, Captivate will launch. You can make your edits in Captivate and when you come back to RoboHelp, everything is re-published and your SWF in RoboHelp is automatically updated.

[JainVivek]

You have the same integration between FrameMaker and Captivate - insert a new SWF in FrameMaker and edit an existing SWF from FrameMaker. It is very similar to FrameMaker and RoboHelp integration. You can edit the FrameMaker file by launching it from RoboHelp and once you save the changes, go back to RoboHelp and just update. In some sense, all the three integrations are very similar - FrameMaker and RoboHelp, RoboHelp and Captivate, FrameMaker and Captivate