Since 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.

Multiple Language Capabilities

I categorize this under new features because RoboHelp 7 introduced Unicode support, but it didn’t provide much in the way of being able to manage localized versions of a project within the same project as the original. However, with RH8, that has changed in a big way, which is an important step for me. I manage two help projects where the content has to be localized, and it’s a pain to have to keep a separate project for each language.

RH8 introduces topic-level and paragraph-level language tags. Frankly, I don’t find the paragraph-level tags useful unless you have content where you need a single paragraph in another language for the purpose of illustration, and you don’t want the jaggedy red underlining. You can highlight the paragraph, right-click, go to Properties, and choose the language on the General tab. This allows RH to use the correct dictionary for that text.

Much more important, though, is the ability to specify a language at the topic level. Like the paragraph-level tag, this applies the appropriate dictionary to the content. This way, you can have the translated versions of an original topic all within the same project; you can even keep the file name the same as long as each version is in a different subfolder within the project. (Whether this last bit is allowed in RH7 or earlier, I’m not sure. I haven’t tried that out yet because I didn’t think of it until I was trying out v8.) You would need conditional build tags to keep the various languages separate in the output.

Multiple TOCs, indexes, and glossaries, which were introduced in RH7, let you have one for each language. If you create a single source layout for each language, you’ll have the output location, conditional build expression, TOC, index, and glossary all selected in the SSL properties so that the setup is specific to each language output, and then the output generation for each one can be fired off pretty quickly.

Previously, if you used conditional build tags to have the content for each language contained in the same help topic, the HTML document title could still be in only one language. Being able to have separate topics for each language gets past this problem so that search and index results show up in the correct language.

The only shortfalls here:

  • You still can specify only one language for the entire project, which determines which .lng file is used for text strings that show up in the output. I would like to be able to associate a language with the project or output in the SSL settings. As it is now, you have to change the project language before generating each output so that the correct .lng file is included. Not a big hang-up, but it adds some inconvenience.
  • RH allows only one map ID per topic in the CSH map ID interface. If you’re doing CSH along with multiple languages (as I’m doing with one project in particular), it would be better to associate the same map ID with the equivalent help topics because they’ll always be in separate outputs. I don’t want to have to tell the developers that they need to increase the conditional coding on the help call to use one map ID for one language on a certain screen, another map ID for the second language, and so on. I’ll put some time into a workaround and post what I figure out.

For some recommendations about doing localized projects in RH8, see my article in the Adobe Developer Center: “Managing Localized Adobe RoboHelp 8 Projects.”

Related entries (auto-generated):

Review of Adobe RoboHelp 8: New Features 2

Review of Adobe RoboHelp 8: Improvements

How I’m Juggling Conditional Build Tags and Localization in RoboHelp

Various Languages in a Quick-Start Guide