Description:
With the release of RoboHelp Office 2002, eHelp Corporation has again improved on its industry-standard help authoring tool. Whether you're new to RoboHelp or a seasoned veteran, the 2002 edition brings in welcome improvements that address areas like Web accessibility compliance, plus it gives even more flexibility to help authors. In a nutshell, RoboHelp Office offers navigation, organization, and indexing capabilities, along with project management features and reliable ways to compile, test, and debug your projects. RoboHelp allows you to create different outputs from a single project, and lets you develop help sections with any popular HTML editor, such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and HomeSite, or RoboHelp's built-in HTML editor. The slim manual accompanying the package (just over 100 pages) is a bite-size introduction to the huge package and is most suitable for newbies. Written in a very inviting tone (exactly what we'd expect from eHelp), it introduces the typical project process of a help project and then offers a tutorial. This tutorial is a full introduction to the RoboHelp package, complete with an engaging sample file that is fully functional, and includes everything from multimedia components to skins to a working table of contents and index. RoboHelp Office 2002 is really a five-pronged approach to help authoring, meaning that you can be choosy about your project format. Available formats in the Office package are WebHelp, HTML Help, JavaHelp, Oracle Help, and WinHelp. And because the user interface has been simplified from previous versions of RoboHelp, it's much easier for developers to select which format to pursue and go forward with the project. Those familiar with RoboHelp will notice some innovative changes. Some of the top features that caught our eye were a new glossary tool, WebHelp's new Section 508 compliance performance (for accessibility guidelines), and topic templates that can streamline your content development by allowing you to reuse formats. Other updates to RoboHelp are welcome as well (although more anticipated): RoboHelp is now Windows XP-compatible, WebHelp is no longer dependent on Java Applets or ActiveX controls, and RoboHelp now supports more file formats for linking to multimedia, including QuickTime (QT) RealPlayer (RAM, RM, RPM, RA), and Flash (SWF). Also worth mentioning are RoboHelp's project management tools that go above and beyond content development. In RoboHelp HTML (which handles all Web-based end formats), the Project View allows developers to view a hierarchy of files and folders, and makes it easy to organize topics, images, style sheets, and other project elements into manageable groups. Link View allows you to see the structure of your project, and also points out broken links and unused files. In RoboHelp Classic (which handles WinHelp development), the Project Manager and Explorer allow for the same management, making a hierarchy view easily accessible, as well as adding special tools for the table of contents and index development. Overall, RoboHelp 2002 is the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and learnable help authoring program we've seen. --Emilie Herbst
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