Producing Help 2 from RoboHelp

[Guest]

We've been using RoboHelp HTML for quite some time, but now the applications we document are being ported to Visual Studio, and we have to be able to produce Help 2. I know it's possible to use FAR, or to take our .xpj to Doc-To-Help and dump Help 2 from DTH, but we'd rather stick with RoboHelp. Does anyone know if Adobe has any plans to support the ability to produce Help 2 with RoboHelp? Thanks.

[Captiv8r]

Welcome to our community, Roger (I'm assuming you are Roger Bell that posted the same question on HATT)

To my knowledge, RoboHelp doesn't do anything to facilitate Help 2 output. If you are absolutely certain you MUST create Help 2, you should probably investigate fellow Microsoft MVP Rob Chandler's HelpWare site.

http://www.helpware.net/

Please note that simple WebHelp works quite well if an application is web based. As far as whether Adobe has any plans for making RoboHelp "Help 2" capable, I'd be doubtful but only Adobe themselves can say for sure. I say doubtful, as Help 2 never really took off from the Help Authoring point of view. AFAIK, it's pretty much only been used internally by Microsoft.

Cheers... Rick

[Guest]

Thanks, Rick. No, I'm not Roger. I'll check out HATT.

I'm afraid Help 2 is going to be a requirement for us.

I have seen Rob Chandler's site. But, naturally, we'd rather stick with RoboHelp if possible.

If anyone has any information about Adobe's intent here, I'd be very interested.

Thanks.

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi again

That's a strange coincidence then. Your post arrived here about five minutes after a nearly identical post was made to HATT.

If you really want to gain Adobe's ear, you need to use the Wish Form to suggest this.

Click here to view the WishForm/Bug Reporting Form

Cheers... Rick

[Pete_Lees]

Hi,

If you want to stick with RoboHelp, you might use it to build an HTML Help 1.x (.chm) file and then convert this to Help 2.0 with FAR — a very quick process, and usually straightfoward. Obviously, though, this may mean that you can't take advantage of all the facilities of Help 2.0, such as dynamic help.

If RoboHelp doesn't provide the option to build Help 2.0 files then it's not so different from most other help authoring tools. I'd imagine that most HAT vendors have taken a look at Help 2.0 at one time or another and, perhaps wrongly, decided that it's too marginal a format to waste development hours on. To my knowledge, only Doc-To-Help, Help & Manual, HelpStudio, and FAR are capable of outputting Help 2.0 files.

Pete