A Review of RoboHelp Office 2002
Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4
By Matthew Ellison
Contents
Click a link below to jump to a particular section; click any "CONTENTS" image following a section heading to jump back here.
This is the first in a series of articles that builds into a personal review of RoboHelp Office 2002. This first article introduces the new release and discusses Topic Templates, Headers and Footers, and the new MS Word Import capability.
When you start using a new version of a software application, you never know how much change to expect. In the past, there have been revolutionary releases of the RoboHelp Office tools: in particular version RoboHelp 5.0, which included the new RoboHelp Explorer Window, and of course version RoboHTML 1.0, which for the first time enabled native HTML authoring.
RoboHelp Office is now a mature and well-established product. At this stage of its development, you don't necessarily expect radical changes. It’s been through the early years, experienced the teething troubles, and grown beyond adolescence (with the odd pimple along the way). You wouldn't necessarily expect a late growing surge. But who knows when the version number hits double digits—or rather would have done, if it had taken the next logical step and moved from version 9 to 10. Maybe the marketing folks at eHelp Corporation intended to play down this auspicious milestone when they named the product RoboHelp Office 2002. (Incidentally, looking back over the past four releases, the numbering system has gone 7, 2000, 9, 2002. It seems we've established a convention of avoiding names that incorporate odd years.)
Anyway, I digress—RoboHelp Office 2002 is an evolutionary, as opposed to revolutionary, release. When you get past the initial RoboHelp Starter front end (which I'll talk more about in Part 2), the user interface for 2002 is almost exactly the same as for version 9 at first glance. In fact at second and third glance, too. This isn't a complaint. I think it's very positive that the ground-rules remain the same, and it bodes well for a smooth upgrade process. When you start digging beneath the surface, however, it's clear that eHelp has put a lot of work into this new version. Commendably, eHelp has focused at lot of its effort on less flashy and glamorous features that really make a difference to the vast majority of Help authors.
RoboHelp 2002 was released in December 2001 with the usual ceremony, and its new features are extolled with lavish prose on the eHelp web site (I’ve always thought their copy writers do a great job). But does this new version live up to this promise? To what extent will the new and changed features improve the experience of RoboHelp authors, and the end users of their Help files? What are the real benefits of upgrading from version 9? I thought I'd take a look at the new product and report on my findings.
eHelp itself lists the top new features of RoboHelp 2002 in the following order:
- FrameMaker (MIF) Import
- Customizable look and feel
- Smart MS Word Import
- Glossary tab in WebHelp
- Topic Templates
- Topic Headers and Footers
I wonder whether this order is based on the amount of work that went into creating each of these new features, or on the perceived importance to a typical user of the product. All these are certainly significant new features—though I would hazard a guess that the topic templates as well as headers and footers will be the two features that prove most helpful of all to the majority of RoboHelp users.
Having spent some time investigating and using the new version, I’ve come up with my own personal list of highlights, which I am planning to cover during the course of this series of articles.
In Part 1 of this series, I’ll cover my first three highlights. Along the way, I’ll also discuss the new Help file that is provided with RoboHelp Office 2002 (I’ve never envied the job of writing the Help for a Help Authoring Tool), and throw in a few minor gripes and suggestions for future versions.
Topic templates provide a way of creating boilerplates for specific types of topics. For example, you might create a template for procedure topics. This could contain dummy text for the elements that are common to all your procedures: title, introduction, numbered steps, tips, related topics, etc. The dummy text would have the correct paragraph styles already assigned. This means that to create new topics based on the template, all you have to do is to replace the dummy text with the appropriate real text for the new topic. The advantage of creating new topics in this way is that it saves the time and labor of assigning the correct style to each topic element, and also ensures that each procedure topic has a consistent structure.
Topic templates may be imported from one RoboHelp project into another. Thus it is possible to ensure that multiple authors working in the same team are all using the same set of topic templates.
A slight limitation of templates is that it is not possible to assign any topic properties to them, other than to specify the cascading style sheet that is associated with it. It might have been nice, for example, to be able to define a default window that would be assigned to any topic created from the template.
This brings me to another very useful new feature, which in some ways relates to templates: headers and footers. These provide a way of attaching a standard topic segment (containing text and/or images) to the start and end of topics. Headers and footers can be updated retrospectively, which makes them extremely powerful. Some examples of the way in which you might use them include: to add a standard copyright statement to the end of every topic, to add a link to a web site at the end of all troubleshooting topics, or to add a product logo to the start of certain top-level topics.
Having defined the header and/or footer (which you do as part of a template), then you assign the template to the appropriate set of topics within your project. These topics will take on the header and footer defined within the template. (Note that, apart from the header and footer, the information within the template body does not have any effect on the content of the existing topics—this information is only used when creating new topics.) You can subsequently update the content of the header or footer in the template (for example, change the date within the copyright statement), and all the topics associated with the template will be updated automatically. This can be a real time saver.
In the current implementation, the easiest available way to assign a template to multiple topics is by using the topic list (in the same way as you might currently assign a specific style sheet to multiple topics). Ideally, I would prefer the ability to select the topics based on the table of contents structure, or even better, based on the topic type.
If you looked at the list of features in RoboHelp HTML 9, you would have seen that it boasted Word import. However, on close examination this feature proved to be of limited use because it imported the entire contents of a Word document into a single topic. Most people instead chose to fall back on good old cut-and-paste to transfer content from Word into RoboHelp HTML—or took the long route of importing from Word into RoboHelp Classic, and then converting the project to RoboHelp HTML.
By contrast RoboHelp 2002 has what eHelp calls "Smart MS Word Import." Put plainly, this means Word import that works properly. When you import a Word document into RoboHelp, you have the option to break the content into topic segments wherever a heading is encountered. You are able to specify the heading levels that RoboHelp should treat as topic breaks. Paragraph styles within Word are mapped to styles with the same name in RoboHelp, and a cascading style sheet is created to faithfully duplicate the formatting of the original document—right down to borders, and space above and below paragraphs.
So far this sounds similar to the Word import capability already included in RoboHelp Classic back as far as version 4. However, 2002 goes further: If it finds a table of contents field within the Word document, it will convert this to a hierarchical set of books and topics within RoboHelp (although this does result in rather a lot of somewhat confusing bookmarks appearing within your RoboHelp project). It will also convert cross-references (implemented with cross-reference fields) within the Word document to hyperlinks between topics.
You also have the option to create a new RoboHelp project based on a Word document. If the Word document has a table of contents, an index, and is properly structured using heading styles, then it is possible to create a reasonably adequate Help system with virtually no manual intervention within RoboHelp (other than to generate the required output Help format). You can also do this with FrameMaker documents, too.
There are, however, a couple of limitations to the Word import capability. The first has to do with the way in which RoboHelp treats paragraphs that have the Normal style in Word. The Normal style is used by most authors as a default style for "vanilla-flavored" paragraphs. Following this logic, I would expect RoboHelp to mark up these paragraphs using the standard HTML <p> tag. Instead, it creates a new class called "Normal" and marks up the paragraphs with <p class="Normal">. This means that you can’t control the formatting of these paragraphs using RoboHelp’s default "Background + Text (BODY)" style. The result is two "Normal" styles being included in RoboHelp’s list of available styles: one of them representing the plain <p> tag, and the other representing the Normal class of the <p> tag—a potentially confusing state of affairs!
Finally, there is a problem with the way that RoboHelp treats imported bulleted paragraphs. Items that included the bullet within the style definition in Word are tagged by RoboHelp using a symbol character and a hanging indent, rather then the strictly correct <li> tag. I know this makes little or no difference to the way the paragraph appears to the end user, but I'm a bit of a purist on this! On the other hand, if the bullet had been assigned manually and was not part of the style definition in Word, then RoboHelp uses the <li> tag, but does not add the correct class attribute to it. As a result, you run the risk of bullet paragraphs appearing in a font that's different than the font used in the rest of your text.
Despite these small glitches, however, Smart MS Word Import is a very valuable and welcome enhancement to RoboHelp Office, which I'm sure all RoboHelp authors who need to work with existing Word-based content will appreciate.
I will continue this article on RoboHelp Office 2002 with Part 2, which explores the new Skins feature and the RoboHelp Starter.
| 
