RoboHelp 7 Support of Hebrew and Arabic

[jdcyclone1]

I am trying to figure out if RH7 supports Hebrew and Arabic languages? Is this something included in the new Unicode/double-byte support? Thanks!

[Peter Grainge]

See the topics on my site.

[johndaigle]

Welcome, jdcyclone
While it has support for 35 languages and Unicode, RH 7 does not support right-to-left languages at this time.
For the list you can download this Reviewer's Guide.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 Reviewer's Guide

Thanx,
john

[RoboColum_n_]

It only supports the following languages...

Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Canadian French, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

[jdcyclone1]

I found this quote on Peter's Web site:
"the reference to 35 languages just refers to the languages we included out-of-the-box, with full support for spell-checking, thesaurus and hyphenation, but beyond that, you can insert any character supported by the Unicode standard and publish it successfully to any format that RoboHelp supports."

So am I correct in saying that Arabic and Hebrew ARE supported because they are supported by the Unicode standard, they just aren't fully supported by RoboHelp (thesaurus, spelling, etc.)?

[Peter Grainge]

Legal opinion is being sought! We'll post back when we have some clarification.

[johndaigle]

It seems the answer was on the Adobe Tech Comm blog all the time

At the present time only left to right, top to bottom languages are supported.
You'll find more here
http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2007/11/adobe_robohelp_7_unicode_enabl.html

I'd suggest adding your request for Hebrew and Arabic to the
Adobe Wish List Form

Thanx
John

[MortenMueller]

Last post was from November 2007, now we´re in August 2009. Has anything happened re. RH support of Arabic and right-to-left languages in the meantime? We use RH7, has anybody discovered any RH7 workarounds for handling Arabic? Is RH8 any better at handling Arabic? Any news re. RH handling of Arabic at all?

Lack of RH support for Arabic is a massive problem for us: our Arabic translators want to use RHX3 (apparently the last RH version with Arabic support) when localizaing our RH projects, but many of the features we use RH7 (such as variables, snippets, etc.) aren't supported by RH X3.

Millions and millions of people use Arabic, and they require documentation too. How come such an important language apparently keeps being neglected in RH?

[RoboColum_n_]

The long and the short of it is that you may be able to generate Arabic ouptut so long as you do not use the RH editor to edit the content. RH8 is the same as RH7 in this respect. You can check out the following links which will help.

• Link one
• Link two

I should also add that whilst other users have managed to get their output to work, there is no guarantee you will. If you manage it, all well and good..

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Read the RoboColum(n).

[Peter Grainge]

Morten Mueller

If this is still of interest to you, there is a method on my site.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[MortenMueller]

Thank you, Peter. Useful!

[Guest]

Peter's method applies to webhelp. What about CHM? Has anyone tried it on a CHM?

[Peter Grainge]

Peter's article states - Please note that it is for WebHelp only, not for compiled  Microsoft HTML Help (CHM).

The techniques required are not possible with a CHM.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Does anyone know if there are any other help authoring tools that are compatible with right-to-left languages (hebrew, arab...)?

[Peter Grainge]

http://hat-matrix.com/compare_hats/find_all_tools_with_selected_features.html

Look under Localisation and Translation.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge