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Discussion about RoboHelp 6 — Interview with Rick Stone
February 3rd, 2007 | Posted in Tech Writer Voices |
Download the MP3 File
Duration: 28 min.
When Adobe released RoboHelp 6, they touched off a hot debate among technical communicators. Rick Stone is one of the most ardent supporters of RoboHelp, and is the one behind the infamous Skinny on Skins file that shows you about a hundred ways to tweak your RoboHelp skin.
In this podcast on RoboHelp 6, the following topics are covered:
- New features in RoboHelp 6
- Rick’s background with RoboHelp
- Robohelp’s integration with Captivate
- Reasons behind inclusion of RoboScreen Capture
- What Rick likes best about RoboHelp
- Most often asked question in RoboHelp forums
- Evaluating whether “new” features are really new
- RoboHelp’s viability as a single-sourcing tool
- Adobe’s move to outsource RoboHelp’s development to India
- Judging whether Adobe will really continue development of RoboHelp
- Comparing RoboHelp with Flare
- Command-line compilation in RoboHelp
- Rewards for serving as a RoboHelp MVP
Links in the Podcast
- MonkeyPI post
- In this Corner Monkey PI post
- Rick’s Robowizard site
- Rick’s Skinny on Skins file
- Adobe’s RoboHelp “Blog”
- Music from Podshow
- To contact Rick, send him an e-mail at rstone75@kc.rr.com.
- To contact me, e-mail me at tom@idratherbewriting.com.
Held in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, the theme of the 8th Annual Documentation and Training Conference is The User Experience. The conference features sessions and workshops that help technical communication professionals improve the usefulness of the information products they create. I’ll be speaking the usability of blogs, including an in-depth tutorial on WordPress.
About Tech Writer Voices
Tech Writer Voices is a weekly podcast covering topics related to technical writing, featuring interviews, presentations, and other tips for technical writers. To stay updated with the latest podcasts on technical writing, be sure to subscribe to Tech Writer Voices using the e-mail subscription feature in the top-right corner of the site.
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February 7th, 2007 at 8:44 am
[...] you ever posted a comment on their blog? After I finished the RoboHelp podcast on Tech Writer Voices, I posted a comment on the Adobe RoboHelp blog letting them know about the podcast. I assumed my [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Hi Rick:
I’m familiar with RoboHelp 2000 Classic, and have a few questions:
1. Would there be writing guidelines for on-line help out there? I’m currently reviewing the content on a bunch of help files written in that were created by my client. I need to know what should go into a user guide as opposed to put a mix of instructions, a lot of definitions, and system behaviour in a huge cartographic mapping application.
2. I need know if it’s possible to work in MS Word to redesign the style of those help files done for ForeHelp, create tables to be used in menu command definitions, then convert the files into RoboHelp without losing the table design.
Thank you so much, I appreciate it in advance!!!
Carole
Senior Technical Writer Consultant
February 14th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Carole,
You may have better luck in the forums, either the Yahoo HATT listserv or the RoboHelp forums on Google Groups or Adobe. But your first question seems like is more about technical writing than RoboHelp (if I’m understanding it correctly). What should go into a help file? I recommend including the tasks that the user wants to perform. You can also include the definitions and perhaps system behavior, but the definitions can go in the glossary section, and the system behavior might best be relegated in a more remote folder. The tasks should be the main focus of any help file.
Your second question, about working in Word to redesign the style of the help files, particularly redesigning tables, I’m not sure. What advantages are there to working in Word rather than the RoboHelp WYSIWYG editor? I’m not familiar with the 2000 classic version, so I can’t really help you there. But I would recommend styling things in RoboHelp rather than another application. I know tables don’t copy and paste well in RoboHelp 5, so I can’t see how functionality would be any better in an earlier version. You basically can’t copy and paste tables from Word to RoboHelp HTML at all.
Good luck. Sorry for the late response.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
[...] first page is my post on 10 Reasons Not to Upgrade to RoboHelp 6. Result 8 on the first page is my Tech Writer Voices podcast on RoboHelp. And result 9 on the first page is the infamous and highly influential post on Monkey PI about [...]
April 21st, 2008 at 7:34 am
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