Adobe RoboHelp 7

Producing online help was once an afterthought to the software development process, and it was usually knocked up in Word using a few macros and Microsoft's free compiler. Eventually, the importance of producing and maintaining high-quality HTML-based help dawned and, with it, the need for dedicated tools. eHelp's RoboHelp emerged as a market leader, but it languished when Macromedia took over the company and paid more attention to its own Flash-based Captivate. Now, Adobe is in charge and promoting RoboHelp once again, both as a standalone and as a core element of its new Technical Communication Suite.

However, RoboHelp's chequered history still casts a long shadow. This is immediately evident in the inclusion of its Word module, which still uses the Microsoft program as its authoring environment. Word 2007 is now supported, and the level of power it manages to provide within an external host is impressive. Even so, it's a real criticism that anyone should be tempted to use a glorified Word add-on rather than a dedicated environment.

Thankfully, the main RoboHelp HTML application has also been given a major overhaul, including support for customisable menu and keyboard shortcuts, although Adobe has bizarrely chosen to copy the look and feel of Microsoft Office 2003 applications, down to the infuriating menus that drop off rarely used commands. Far more useful is the introduction - not before time - of a multiple document interface. It's an improvement, but hardly a model of streamlined modern efficiency.

This means that many users will still want to begin authoring the text for their help systems externally, and the new support for Word 2007 DOCX files is important here. Even more so is the greatly enhanced support for FrameMaker. This includes the ability to add multiple FM and BOOK files directly or by reference, to map styles and re-use mappings, to convert styles to HTML lists, to apply custom HTML tags to styles, to ignore numbering and so on. RoboHelp HTML also now supports FrameMaker conditional build tags and user-defined variables. Taken together with the core new Unicode support and the wide range of language dictionaries, this means that RoboHelp and FrameMaker can now work together handling multiple languages, versions and outputs from a single source file.

Once you've imported or roughed out topics, RoboHelp lets you enhance them by adding tables, hyperlinks, references and so on. You can also add graphical elements and directly add screenshots via the dedicated - although again dated - RoboScreenCapture utility. Flash-based demonstrations and assessments produced with Captivate 3 can also be included. There's a dedicated HTML view, and RoboHelp HTML now produces cleaner code (without the proprietary Kadov tags), as well as the editor offering improved customisation and help regarding tags and styles as you type. You can also now save reusable blocks of code.

As you'd expect, it's relatively straightforward to create a table of contents (TOC), index and glossary. The relevant editors have been reworked to let you create multiple TOCs, indexes and glossaries in the same project.

RoboHelp supports a wide range of online help formats, including JavaHelp, Oracle Help and Microsoft HTML Help, with the preferred WebHelp and FlashHelp also available via the separate RoboHelp Server, for additional features such as user tracking. These browser-based formats also now provide support for synonym-based search, keyword highlighting and breadcrumb links, all helping users get to information they're looking for more quickly. You can also export documentation for print either directly to PDF or, more usefully, to Word DOC (and now DOCX) format, enabling greater design control. However, the lack of FrameMaker FM export, let alone round-tripping, is disappointing.