Future of RoboHelp?

[Jared Hess]

A colleague of mine went to a localization conference and heard from some big software names out there that it sounded like development and support for RoboHelp was going to be dropped. I'm wondering if there's anything substantial to this rumor? Any of you heard anything?

[Captiv8r]

Hi Jared

Really? That sounds totally mad.

That would seem odd with Adobe putting lots of effort into RoboHelp as well as including it in their Technical Communication Suite.

My guess is that the source that made that announcement is either horribly misinformed or is wishing to cast a bad light on the future of RoboHelp. Possibly in an effort to bolster support for a competing tool.

Cheers... Rick

[FMnRH]

Hi,

This may be off-tangent but from my "newbie" understanding of the Tech Comm Suite, if I have my old RoboHelp 6 online help files, is the best and easiest way for me to update the online help files is to import the new files into RoboHelp 7 (from ATC)? Ideally, I wanted to take advantage of FrameMaker 8 and add FrameMaker files by reference into a new RH7 project, but appears that I lose some RoboHelp functionality, like image maps and DHTML effects like expanding hotspots and drop down hotspots. Can you confirm that I do lose this functionality?

Thanks,
FMnRH

[Peter Grainge]

Ask them to name who was pushing this nonsense and exactly what was said. It was the case when Macromedia were around but everyone knows that Adobe came along and COMPLETELY turned that around.

To quote Mark Twain, "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated"

Please let's not waste more time on this.

[Jared Hess]

Right. Well, it seemed rather nonsensical to me as well. But my boss wanted me to find out, so that's why I asked you who are more in the know than I. Anyway, I talked some more with my colleague, and he said it came from a presenter from PTC (who develop among other software tools, a documentation tool called ArborText). Also, from what was said, it seemed that it was more an opinion than anything based on fact. Thanks for the feedback.

[Guest]

Hi Jared, my name is RJ Jacquez and I’m a Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe for all products in the Technical Communication Suite, including RoboHelp, and I can assure you that RoboHelp has never been more alive than it is today, so there’s absolutely nothing to be concerned about, and as anyone would expect from a software company like Adobe, we are already hard at work on the next major release of RoboHelp, as well as all the other products in the Suite. It’s unfortunate that some vendors have to resort to spreading these rumors in order to highlight their products. Here at Adobe, we have excellent products and we let them do all the talking.

Sincerely,

RJ Jacquez
Adobe Technical Communication Suite
Adobe in Technical Communication Blog

[RoboColum_n_]

It sounds like the source was either trying to rubbish RH in favour of his own tool or was horribly out of date (as Peter suggested) and therefore not worth listening to.

[Jared Hess]

RJ, Thanks for the information. That's good to know. And good to hear it from someone official.