This post continues my comments on the results of my experiments using RoboHelp Packager for AIR on a WebHelp project.

General Bugs

Having Back and Forward buttons is great. However, in Classic Help, they didn’t always seem to follow my navigation path. I don’t use browse sequences (and I turned that feature off anyway in the AIR generation dialog), so I don’t think I’m misunderstanding the purpose of the buttons.

The Classic Help TOC seems a little buggy when the Favorites pane is open. Everything worked except when I had a bunch of books open and had to scroll to get to the last book. When I scrolled, I got behavior like the selected book or another book automatically closing, or the TOC would jump so I couldn’t see where the selected topic was. (If I scrolled back up, the auto-closing book would open up again.)

Where I had Captivate demos in a topic, a huge space was inserted before each Captivate demo about the size of the demo itself. The demos work fine, but that big space is an irritant.

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I had some time today for testing the RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (isn’t saying “Adobe AIR” like saying “ATM machine” or “PIN number”?), so I went to town. I kept notes as I went. I would be flooding the Packager forum with threads after exercising the Packager, so I thought it would be better to not be the kind of guest who makes himself at home to the point of leaving his clothes and dirty dishes strewn all over the house. Instead, I’ll provide my critique here in my own space.

Please be aware that these are coming generally in the order that I made the notes, though there is some semblance of organization of related topics. And unless otherwise noted, I’m talking about the “Classic Help” layout, since that’s the one I tried first.

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At the STC conference, I remember someone—possibly Scott Abel in a presentation—saying that technical communicators really ought to be out in the online support forums for the products that they document. I agree; in the forums you can see the problems that real users are having and what the answers are if anyone has provided them. Being the technical writer, you may know some of those answers yourself. But at the very least, you can find out how people are using the product and what frustrates them.

It seems that Adobe heard the call. Within the last couple of days, a self-identified “technical writer for RH working at Adobe” has begun participating in the RoboHelp forums on Adobe’s site.

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One of the topics the panel addressed—however briefly—in the opening session of the 2008 Summit of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) was the need for us to have user participation in and feedback on our content. This was of interest because our team at work has been looking into doing this.

The irony of the situation lay in the fact that adjacent to the hall where this session was held, a number of vendors were waiting to catch society members’ interest and corporate dollars. In his presentation on using user-generated content in documentation, Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler referred to the lack of Web 2.0 software. An STC member I talked to on Monday after one of the education sessions said that she had asked one of the Adobe Systems representatives about Web 2.0 capabilities in technical communication software.

“We don’t do that yet,” the representative told her.

Fundamental problem.

Personally, due to my current experience using WordPress to blog, I’ve been exploring the possibility of using it to provide a help community for the projects I work on. Because it’s a blogging platform, conversation is part of its definition.

Right now, the big push—and therefore the big race among vendors—is single sourcing and structured content. That’s what they’re providing, but that’s only part of the puzzle at this point.

If STC has any clout, I would like to see it influence the tech comm software companies to provide us easy ways to encourage, receive, and store user feedback and contributions. Right now, we have to resort to JavaScript-driven links or forms to get feedback. I see it on the RoboHelp forums: If someone decides halfway into a 5,000-topic project to incorporate something like this, he’s got to use a find and replace tool or—some of us have resorted to this—manually going through each topic and pasting the chunk of code in the code view of each topic. Not all technical communicators are members of STC, but the society could advocate for the profession at large for this kind of software.

Our software has to make it easy for us to do what we’re being called upon to do in our profession. It doesn’t matter if all the software suites provide it, as long as the ability is there so we can make use of it. If they don’t provide it, our organizations may have to keep our money and choose tools that are both free and accommodating.

Credit for this one goes to Rick Stone, a.k.a. RoboWizard. I was having this problem and didn’t know what was causing it, and someone was smart enough (you’ll notice it wasn’t me) to put in a post about this in the RoboHelp forums.

Here’s the situation: The help author checks his WebHelp or FlashHelp output files in to a Subversion repository where the developers check in their code. This way, when the code is all rolled up for application builds, the help goes along for the ride. The help author has his output location set to a directory that is under Subversion control. However, every time he generates his output and tries to check it in, Subversion gives him an error. The help author rants and raves against Subversion, RoboHelp, and everything under the sun (you’ll notice that this also isn’t me).

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The latest patch for RoboHelp 7 is available on the RoboHelp Service Releases page. The read-me file lists quite a few fixes.

You can get the patch also by going to Help > Updates in RoboHelp, or for some people, the update happens automatically. (Neither of those methods have worked for me—they seem to be broken.) Go to Help > About to see what version you’re currently running.

Microsoft lost a lawsuit, so they had to change the way that Internet Explorer handles items in <object> tags. That means Flash content. Before RoboHelp 6 I think it was, both the toolbar and the left pane suffered from Microsoft’s solution: When you hover over a Flash movie, it is outlined in gray, and a tooltip appears, announcing, “Click to activate and use this control.” An extra click was required before using the toolbar and the left pane. (In RH 6 and 7, only the nav pane gets this message.)

Very annoying.

Since not only did it annoy me to have to click a couple of extra times, I try to avoid stirring up irritation in my users if I can help it. Microsoft’s workaround is to use a JavaScript document.write function in an include file to write the >object< code into the page. But the way FlashHelp is set up, it’s not that simple.

Here’s how to make it work.

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