Journals by RSS
Journals by EmailSince the release of RoboHelp 8 in January, I’ve spent some time taking a look at new features and improvements. Here’s my review of this version. I paid particular attention to features that matter to me, so this is not comprehensive. I suggest downloading the Reviewer’s Guide and using it to learn about the changes. (I also recommend that if you look through the overview of the changes, wait until you get into the detailed explanations before trying to find the features described.) I’m writing this review in something of a piecemeal fashion.
Styles and Formatting Pod
Like Word, styles show up in a separate pod in RH8. I like having a list of styles visible rather than a dropdown box. Because of the similarity to Word, I was expecting to be able to single-click to apply a style, but I discovered I had to double-click. Not a big inconvenience, but something to get used to. To edit a style, right-click and select Edit.
W3C Validator
RH8 includes a tool that validates code against World Wide Web Consortium standards. After I converted a copy of a project to RH8 and ran the validator against a topic (I’ll talk more about the code in the next post), it returned only one problem: a conditional build tag. Those are stripped out when generating outputs, though, because after generation, they’re not needed.
Twisties
Peter Grainge has had a method for doing twisties on his website for quite a while, and now RH8 includes the ability to create drop-down hotspot styles that include twisties. Twisties are image swaps that happen when the hotspot text is clicked. They’re a way to indicate visually to a user that they can expose and hide text.
In the Styles dialog for twisties, though, the labels for the images are confusing. I think “Close image” should say “Closed image,” and “Opened image” would make more sense than “Open image”—or they could just swap the labels. I’m probably nitpicking here, but “Close image” makes me think “I click it in this state to close it,” when the opposite is true.
Autonumbering for Figures
You can specify a style for autonumbering figures in a topic. When you apply the style to the caption, RH prepends the figure numbering in the format you’ve specified.
RH seemed to have to work a little harder to handle a topic when I created the style and applied it, and for a moment or two, I thought I’d gotten the blank topic of death. It takes two or three seconds to apply the autonumbering style, probably because it has to figure out where it is in the numbering.
Features I’m Interested in But Didn’t Have Time to Try
Even with a thirty-day trial, the fact that I have a full-time job that includes keeping existing help projects up to date, as well as having other things going on, I wasn’t able to get all the way through the Reviewer’s Guide. I set out to try certain things, and aside from that, I had to try out things from the Guide as I had time.
I didn’t get far enough in the Reviewer’s Guide, unfortunately, to find that I could have specified some Word import settings at the project level so that I didn’t have to keep setting them every time I imported a Word document. (I imported the same Word document into my converted project multiple times, doing different settings each time, to see the different effects on the same document. Results of those experiments are coming in the next post.)
I also like the concept of linking topics to source Word documents (like the way that you can have images referenced in InDesign and relink when the image changes). Usually, if I’m using Word to author, I write the original document in Word. After it’s reviewed, I move the content into RH, and then I do updates in RH. So I’m not sure yet how much I would use this feature.
I like the idea of the table templates and styles, but I don’t use a lot of tables, so I didn’t get into that feature.
Related posts (auto-generated):
1 Comment to 'Review of Adobe RoboHelp 8: New Features 2'
February 26, 2009
Good feature review, Ben!
I also really enjoyed reading your new article in the Adobe Developer Network concerning localization workflows.
One thought I’d add. Having downloaded the RoboHelp Reviewer’s Guide, I would recommend downloading it completely to your hard drive.
Then, if you go to the bottom of the PDF guide, you’ll find a bunch of Captivate movie tutorial/demos that describe the new features. You don’t know they are there until you scroll way down to the end.
Thanks,
john
Evergreen, Colorado