OK Let's first offer what little I can.
- Still no French version available for RoboHelp (Madcap
promised us a French version of Flare).
PG So Flare doesn't solve that one either.
- The search function in WebHelp doesn't work really good
enough, so we're stuck with CHM files for now. (it's even worse
that our help is in French, some words aren't even found).
PG You are not stuck with the WebHelp Search. See what is on
my site. I have seen that seamlessly integrated into RH from a
toolbar button. Cost under £100.
- The integration with SourceSafe doesn't work as well as it
should. We have problems with .apj files getting checked out for no
reason.
PG Cannot comment.
- RoboHelp crashes a lot when playing with conditionnal build
tags (when removing them in batch), even after several reinstalls.
PG. I don't see too many reports of this. No consolation to
you but nothing I can add.
- Again with the tags, RoboHelp can't seem to be able to
remove them when there are more than one on an object. We can't
even create new colors, it crashes the software.
PG. I have had no problems on this and again don't see many
reports. KittyLiz did report the colour issue yesterday with X4 but
I tested it and it all worked fine.
- Projects with more than 1000 topics cannot be compiled (in
CHM), we have to make 2 different projects and merge them.
PG. This really should NOT be a problem. I am sure there are
many people compiling with significantly more topics.
- We cannot use French quotes (« ») since it's
mapped to the undo keyboard shortcut.
PG No comment
- We use both lowercase and uppercase letters to code our
files, and RoboHelp (maybe it's SourceSafe fault) sometimes decide
to make a file lowercase only. Kinda give problems when working
with javascript files.
PG No problems experienced here either.
- The Kadov tags make the debugging hard to do.
PG Yup, everyone hates that. Learn to enjoy the madcap
stylenames instead. :-)
- The multi-find search and replace tool doesn't work as it
should and crashes most of the time.
PG Everyone knows that is bad and most use the low cost FAR
application.
- Converting from Word doesn't give good results.
PG See the topic on my site. It does offer some tips. Better
still though, if you can afford 40 copies of Flare, you can afford
one copy of Dreamweaver 8 to import a Word document. Does a lovely
job with nice code. Then import that into RH.
****************************************
The extent of the problems does make me wonder if these
problems are really stemming from importing from Word to some
extent or the use of source control. But whatever the cause, my
concern would be that given it is not normal for RH to exhibit all
these issues it sort of points to your projects or environment. To
then expect Flare to handle these projects without such issues
might be a bit optimisic is where I am coming from.
Have you tried it? As you are talking about merging, I would
be worried about using Flare. I know you are merging CHMs and that
may be different. Quite simply you have to do a load of multi file
find and replace work to merge webhelp to the point where I decided
it was a poorer application for my needs. There's a little bit of
information on my site about Flare.
If you are buying 40 copies, I would test it to death before
risking my job.
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