RoboHelp7 without help!?!

[No42]

Nowadays you get a first step or content help for every software when you press F1.

What happens in RoboHelp7 (as i understood a software to produce help! LOL) ?
It opens a context sensitve help! RoboHelp HTML - Help:
BUT: You can't search, you can't ...hm so many things you can't ... Not worth to list them here!

Next try: Menu - Help - Content & Index
At least it opens a searchable help window with content.
Great. I thought.
BUT, YOU CAN'T FIND ANYTHING.
Did anybody anytime found anything with that help.

Don't worry I thought, have look to online help.
Yeah: I found RoboHelp 7 resources.
THERE IS and we proudly present: LiveDocs.
LIVEDOCS (For me now it sounds like SkyNet in terminator;-)
The same: YOU CAN'T FIND ANYTHING
WHO wrote this software? WHO is responsible for this?
WHERE is adobes quality management????

So far: NO HELP available!

What do next?
I searched in the installation directory for chm files.
And really, I found <robohtml.chm>.
You won't believe it:
At Ieast I found a HELPFUL and searchable HELP! After TWO DAYS!

I'm so sorry, but there is one more to tell you about RoboHelp7:
One more embarrassment:
It's a German Helpfile and german umlaute äöüß display as hieroglyphs in the topic list. Yes, true, that alone is not upsetting.
BUT alltogether, for my part I think about RoboHelp7 as a SCANDAL.

And still I wait for a response of a bug report from monday I sent to Adobe: Nested frames in a table of a FM8 lead to a crash.
But this is another story.

I'm the only one here who feels outsmarted to pay money for this software?
At least I got FM8 with this TCS.

[Peter Grainge]

When you say you cannot find anything, do you mean nothing happens when you start the search or that it is not finding what you want?

I'm not at my RH7 machine but did you look for other languages after finding the German file? There should be three more, English, French and Japanese.

Bug reports don't get a response but I do know that they all get read and put into the database for actioning. If you want a response, then you have to contact Support.

I'll look later for the other CHMs but meantime please expand on what you mean by getting nothing? What is it you are looking for?

[JainVivek]

Go to Tools-> Options. Select the checkbox for "Use Offline Help". If you find issues with LiveDocs, you can always use the local copy of the documentation.

[No42]

You don't need to sit on a RH7 machine.
Just go to this site:
" http://help.adobe.com/en_US/RoboHTML/7.0/"

Search for e.g 'import'.
What do you find?
That's the online help.
Offline are the same poor results or even less!

BTW: I'll not looking for English, French and Japanese files.

[Peter Grainge]

I take your point on the online help and will raise that with someone at Adobe.

Using the offline help though I got over 100 topics listed when I searched on Import.

I don't understand how it took two days to search for the CHMs on your PC.

[No42]

What offline help do you mean.
The one which opens from the menu, the one which open when you press F1?
Sorry for my english.
Please read my first message again and tell me what you didn't understand.

Maybe you understand the following from a guy who published a message in RoboHelp HTML:

From Handy13 "11/24/2007 07:51:03 PM"
Converting an existing application from Winhelp to HTMLHelp
PART I

...
b. Called Robohelp for help.
c. Not much help. They were nice though.
d. The Robohelp program’s Help – Contents & Index resulted in some weird semi-on-line page.
i. It brought up an error message when I tried to search for help on anything (like the word “map” for example)
ii. Search using that page says “LiveDocs Search Results – your search for map site: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Robohelp/RHTML/7.0 did not match any documents…”
iii. There was no scroll bar so when I did manage to get something up in that window I could not see the rest of the article.
iv. I did not discover the html help files buried in the Robohelp installation directory until a couple of weeks had gone by. That did not help my understanding of how to use Robohelp.
...

[JBennettTX]

What Jain and Peter mean by offline help is that you have two options when you open from the Help menu. The default is for Help to look in the LiveDocs material, but you can change that under Tools > Options so that Robo opens a local version of Help.

Another weird thing is that even though the searches on the LiveDocs site return little or no information, you can redo the search on that results page with "RoboHelp 7" added to the search string, and you will get results. At least, that's how it works for me. Try a search for "map" using the online version, and you get no hits. Do a search--on that results page--using "map RoboHelp 7" (without the quotation marks) and you get 135 hits. This has been brought up in the forums before, and it sounds like Adobe is aware of the problem. Until they get it fixed, the offline help is your best bet.

As for feeling outsmarted for paying for RH 7, I plan to buy my own copy soon. Sure, Robo will sometimes make you pull your hair out and drink heavily and swear at the kids and lose your mind, but it's still a pretty good tool for a lot of writing tasks.

[Peter Grainge]

As far as your comments about the online help are concerned, I acknowledged that the way it is working is not very useable and I indicated I would advise Adobe of the comments. That I have done.

What help you access when you hit F1 or access it any other way depends on the setting that Vivek Jain referred to. The one in Tools | Options.

If you set that to use the offline help, that is what I am talking about. You commented

Search for e.g 'import'.
What do you find?
That's the online help.
Offline are the same poor results or even less!

The only point where I disagreed with you was that when I searched for Import in the English version of the offline help, I got over 100 hits which does not seem to match your statement about getting "the same poor results or even less".

[No42 · Accepted solution]

RoboHelp7 is sold for US$999.

Can't you expect that it is deployed with a working help system?
But NO.
It has a help system which is per default a not working online help system.

Nowhere is stated that you are NOT using offline help when using "Contents & Index" on the help menu.

Nowhere a clue that you may switch to offline help by a option somewhere.

Of course, I know that now. Thanks to all of you.

But what a waste of time, energy, ...
Such an annoyance.

[Peter Grainge]

But I thought 42 was the answer to everything, so why would you need help?

I jest. The serious point you raise has been taken up with Adobe so let's hope it gets better.

[No42]

Yes42. I thougth that's the answer, but then came ... RoboHelp7;-)