A Review of RoboHelp Office 2002
Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4
By Matthew Ellison
Skins represent one of the most glamorous and high-profile new additions to RoboHelp Office, and you may remember that eHelp put "Customizable look and feel" at number two in its list of new features. In common with many of the new features that I have been reviewing, Skins are a part of the RoboHelp HTML component and the WebHelp output format only, and are not applicable to RoboHelp Classic users.
It’s perhaps tempting to write Skins off as a purely cosmetic feature that has little real value in improving the experience of either Help author or user. However, based on my experience of working with a number of different organizations, I know how important it can be to tailor the look-and-feel of the Help environment. And that’s exactly what Skins enable you to do for WebHelp. eHelp has clearly put a lot of work into this area, and they have come up with a system that is highly flexible and easy to use, which should meet the needs of even the most demanding Help designers.
The idea behind Skins is that you can specify precisely the way in which the topics, navigation, and toolbars are laid out and presented to the user within the WebHelp browser window. Within your control are background colors, buttons (you can select from a range of standard options or specify your own custom gifs), font size for the TOC, index and search, and a range of other variables. Together, a collection of values for all these visual characteristics is known as a Skin.
Here is a screenshot of RoboHelp's new Skin Editor:
You can select from a range of Skins that RoboHelp supplies "off the shelf" or you can create your own Skins. With the default Skin applied, a WebHelp system looks like the following:
All the information for a Skin is actually saved within a .ZKN file (don’t ask me what the three letters stand for), and may be exchanged between different RoboHelp projects.
eHelp has a shared gallery of Skins on its web site, and is encouraging RoboHelp authors to contribute to it—I think this is a great idea. However, let’s not all get too carried away with this! If you need to be able to incorporate your company’s logo into the WebHelp frameset, Skins provide a useful and easy way to do this. But we shouldn’t channel too much of our creative time and energy into new Skins at the expense of the information content of our Help!
Since the RoboHelp Starter is the first change to the product that you’re going to notice, I was tempted to discuss it first in this review. However, I think it has far less significance than the topics I have covered so far.
 What is it? Well, when your install RoboHelp Office 2002, you are going to find your desktop augmented with a single icon (RoboHelp Starter) instead of the separate icons that you had before for RoboHelp Classic and RoboHelp HTML. It makes the product look more like one seamless package. The Starter is actually a slightly reworked version of the RoboHelp Office application that existed in RoboHelp 9. However, because (by default) it's the sole access point into RoboHelp from your desktop, the Starter is likely to gain more attention and use. For those of you who preferred the old state of affairs, you can still add shortcuts for RoboHelp Classic and/or RoboHelp HTML to your desktop (and delete the RoboHelp Starter, if you'd like).
If you do choose to use the RoboHelp Starter, you’ll find that it has been designed with novice Help authors in mind. The key (and, in fact, only) differences from the old RoboHelp Office application are that it includes guidance on each of the different Help formats (more about that in a second), and it enables you to create a new project by importing from Word or FrameMaker, as described in Part 1 of my review. It also has an additional two buttons for starting RoboHelp Classic and RoboHelp HTML, respectively. (It's interesting to see old terminology, RoboHelp and RoboHTML, used in the tool tips for these buttons—which have been moved from Tools tab in the RoboHelp Office application.)
I said that the RoboHelp Starter provides guidance on the various available Help formats. This is a nice idea, because this an important area that Help newbies often find difficult to grasp. This information is provided by the following "Welcome to RoboHelp" screen:
In my view, this screen is somewhat cluttered and potentially rather confusing to the novice user. Each Help format has three links: an icon and text link (that both start the New Project Wizard), and a "More info..." link that displays additional information about the format, as seen in the following screen:
The grayed out Back and Next buttons on each information Window seem to offer the prospect of further explanation sometimes being available; however, in no case is there ever more than one screen of information! It appears that the developers were planning a mini-tutorial on each format, but then scaled back to a single screen of information at the last minute. The information provided, although brief, is practical and useful—I like the way each includes a concise set of bullets stating the applications that the format is suited to. I doubt, however, that the statement about the WebHelp format as "the most feature-rich format after WebHelp Enterprise" will mean much to the average novice user of RoboHelp Office.
I will continue this article with Part 3, where I discuss Pure HTML Output, and a range of other useful new features in RoboHelp Office 2002.
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