Question
Lots of goodies seen at the Adobe RoboHelp STC sneak peeks
In three different sessions at the STC conference in
Minneapolis I saw pre-beta demonstrations of RoboHelp "next".
Certainly there's a mind-boggling number of new features. But more
than that, Adobe has spent a lot of time listening to authors about
ways to make their workflow easier. The presentations were made by
Akshay Madan, Adobe Product Manager for RoboHelp. He and his team
have obviously been busy! Here's a recap:
1. What struck me right away was a multiple document interface (MDI). You can work nicely among any number of topics that are open and displayed in tabs. I'm glad to see that they are not planning to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The popular and friendly Word-like WYSIWYG editor is still central to the main work area. You still feel like a writer and not a coder (no offense to programmers).
2. At the same time, the UI is more modern and cleanly laid out. There are also customizeable toolbars and "pods" that can be moved around and configured the way the author works. These configurations can be given a name so for example, an author can have a layout for authoring sessions and one for editing sessions.
3. These movable panels or pods are handy, but I also like that you can quickly return to "factory defaults" in case the layout becomes too fragmented.
4. No <kadov> tags! These much-maligned tags are often used by competitors to bad-mouth RoboHelp. Well, they'll have to come up with something else because I saw nice clean, color-customizable code behind the WYSIWYG editor.
5. There is also Unicode and double-byte support for something like 34 different languages including Asian and Eastern European characters.
6. For single sourcing, the author can create multiple TOCs and name them so that they are easy to use when generating output for different audiences (or for print vs. online).
7. Help for translators: Because of MDI, a translator can have an English topic open in a pane side-by-side with a Japanese topic for easier comparison and editing. Languages can also be mixed. So, I can have Japanese, Greek or any number of words or phrases mixed within a topic. The same is true for the TOC, Index of keywords or Glossary of terms and definitions.
8. Snippets of HTML code make it easy to have chunks of text and graphics saved for re-use. For example a logo graphic and copyright statement can be saved and placed in multiple topics. If you change the logo or text in the snippet, the changes are populated wherever the snippet has been placed (kind of like RoboHelp 6's User Defined Variables on steroids).
9. Breadcrumbs offer a nice touch for the user experience with links that show the user where they are in the heirarchy of topics.
10. Searching in WebHelp/Flashhelp: When searching, the "hit" terms are highlighted in a color of the author's choosing. This can easily be turned off by the user as well.
11. Much improved Framemaker MIF support. Matthew Stern was at STC and was impressed. "You can import a MIF file directly into RoboHelp and everything is retained: variables, graphics (including Flash and Acrobat 3D files), and conditional text."
12. There is support for MS Vista and Office 2007 including the new XML-based .docx format, (though this was not yet enabled in the pre-alpha build I saw.)
13. Better Screen capture manipulation within topics.
14. Adobe representatives also said there would be news posted on the Adobe TechComm Blog with invitations to sign up for the beta program when it gets underway.
After using RoboHelp since 1992, I get caught up in the feature race like everyone else. But, as Vivek Jain, Group Product Manager for RoboHelp said, features are not the only thing that define innovation. Rather he says, "Quality is innovation."
This should put a rest to the "RoboHelp is dead" garbage.
As a user and instructor since 1992 it was very satisfying and exciting to see these sneak peeks and that Adobe is not only bringing RoboHelp back to life, but making it a central piece of the suite of applications that make up the Technical Communications (RoboHelp, Framemaker, Captivate and Acrobat).
Sneaks peeks were also shown for Adobe Framemaker 8 and Adobe Captivate 3 as well. The sneak peeks were introduced with the usual caveats, such as,“The features presented during the Technology Sneak peek contain proof of concept features and features in the development pipeline. They are not final for the next release however we want to take this opportunity to show the general direction of where we are taking the products.” They also mentioned that while they cannot comment about release dates, they "expect to see new releases this year." However, from what I saw, this pre-alpha build looked stable and rich with the functionality I've outlined.
It's an exciting time for technical communicators!
John
Evergreen Online Learning, LLC
Evergreen, Colorado
1. What struck me right away was a multiple document interface (MDI). You can work nicely among any number of topics that are open and displayed in tabs. I'm glad to see that they are not planning to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The popular and friendly Word-like WYSIWYG editor is still central to the main work area. You still feel like a writer and not a coder (no offense to programmers).
2. At the same time, the UI is more modern and cleanly laid out. There are also customizeable toolbars and "pods" that can be moved around and configured the way the author works. These configurations can be given a name so for example, an author can have a layout for authoring sessions and one for editing sessions.
3. These movable panels or pods are handy, but I also like that you can quickly return to "factory defaults" in case the layout becomes too fragmented.
4. No <kadov> tags! These much-maligned tags are often used by competitors to bad-mouth RoboHelp. Well, they'll have to come up with something else because I saw nice clean, color-customizable code behind the WYSIWYG editor.
5. There is also Unicode and double-byte support for something like 34 different languages including Asian and Eastern European characters.
6. For single sourcing, the author can create multiple TOCs and name them so that they are easy to use when generating output for different audiences (or for print vs. online).
7. Help for translators: Because of MDI, a translator can have an English topic open in a pane side-by-side with a Japanese topic for easier comparison and editing. Languages can also be mixed. So, I can have Japanese, Greek or any number of words or phrases mixed within a topic. The same is true for the TOC, Index of keywords or Glossary of terms and definitions.
8. Snippets of HTML code make it easy to have chunks of text and graphics saved for re-use. For example a logo graphic and copyright statement can be saved and placed in multiple topics. If you change the logo or text in the snippet, the changes are populated wherever the snippet has been placed (kind of like RoboHelp 6's User Defined Variables on steroids).
9. Breadcrumbs offer a nice touch for the user experience with links that show the user where they are in the heirarchy of topics.
10. Searching in WebHelp/Flashhelp: When searching, the "hit" terms are highlighted in a color of the author's choosing. This can easily be turned off by the user as well.
11. Much improved Framemaker MIF support. Matthew Stern was at STC and was impressed. "You can import a MIF file directly into RoboHelp and everything is retained: variables, graphics (including Flash and Acrobat 3D files), and conditional text."
12. There is support for MS Vista and Office 2007 including the new XML-based .docx format, (though this was not yet enabled in the pre-alpha build I saw.)
13. Better Screen capture manipulation within topics.
14. Adobe representatives also said there would be news posted on the Adobe TechComm Blog with invitations to sign up for the beta program when it gets underway.
After using RoboHelp since 1992, I get caught up in the feature race like everyone else. But, as Vivek Jain, Group Product Manager for RoboHelp said, features are not the only thing that define innovation. Rather he says, "Quality is innovation."
This should put a rest to the "RoboHelp is dead" garbage.
As a user and instructor since 1992 it was very satisfying and exciting to see these sneak peeks and that Adobe is not only bringing RoboHelp back to life, but making it a central piece of the suite of applications that make up the Technical Communications (RoboHelp, Framemaker, Captivate and Acrobat).
Sneaks peeks were also shown for Adobe Framemaker 8 and Adobe Captivate 3 as well. The sneak peeks were introduced with the usual caveats, such as,“The features presented during the Technology Sneak peek contain proof of concept features and features in the development pipeline. They are not final for the next release however we want to take this opportunity to show the general direction of where we are taking the products.” They also mentioned that while they cannot comment about release dates, they "expect to see new releases this year." However, from what I saw, this pre-alpha build looked stable and rich with the functionality I've outlined.
It's an exciting time for technical communicators!
John
Evergreen Online Learning, LLC
Evergreen, Colorado
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