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.

XHTML Code

The code in RH8’s topics and supporting files is cleaner and more standardized. Styles like <li><p style=”list.p”> have been done away with. However, making something italic or bold results in duplicate tags in the HTML view and in the output:

<span style="font-style: italic;"><i>Italicized text</i></span>
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><b>Bolded text</b></span>

I would expect <em> and <strong> tags instead, which are more standard and are used in Dreamweaver. The tags pass validation, but they don’t make for uncluttered code. But the rest of the code seemed pretty clean.

Substring and Phrase Searching

This a big improvement over previous versions, which didn’t allow phrase searching and showed only topic titles in the results. I found that the results set display hasn’t changed in FlashHelp, which may be because it takes different coding, and I’m sure not as many people use FlashHelp as do WebHelp and CHM.

I got a weird result with my experimenting though—even though I searched for a phrase with quotation marks around it, and the search correctly picked up the only topic with that phrase, the highlight feature highlighted other instances of the words within the phrase, and even partial words. The word “are” was in my search phrase, and in the topic where the phrase was found, all instances of “ar” were highlighted, as well. What?

To-Do List

Previous versions of RH had predefined statuses for topics. Now, you can specify your own workflow by customizing the to-do list. This will help me especially in projects where I deal with localization. I won’t have to use a separate spreadsheet to keep track of when I’ve made changes to a topic that need translating—I can do it right there in RH.

AIR Output

Back when I did a review of the RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, I suggested that AIR be an single source layout like WebHelp or FlashHelp instead of being an extra step after generating WebHelp. Maybe the big guys at Adobe heard me (and possibly others), or they had already thought of it. In any case, I think AIR help is a good step, and I’d like to see it mature and have more possibilities for customizing the look and feel. I like the idea of having a single file that’s not a CHM.

File Extensions

Now, help topic files can have the file extension of .html. Previous versions forced .htm, but some people prefer .html, and for others, it’s an organizational requirement.

Related entries (auto-generated):

Review of Adobe RoboHelp 8: New Features 1

Review of Adobe RoboHelp 8: New Features 2