This team blog intends to provide interesting and useful info about Technical Communication, FrameMaker, RoboHelp and related issues. Contributors include Akshay Madan, Product Manager, Adobe RoboHelp and Mahesh Kumar Gupta, Product Manager, Adobe FrameMaker.
You kept asking but till 8, we said wait! Now 2009 ends this wait with 9.
Yes, I am referring to the enriched User Interface of FrameMaker 9. I am sure you are enjoying the power of this power pack which boosts your productivity and efficiency with your existing workflows and also brings new functionality which you can leverage to create new workflows which you could just conceive earlier but couldn’t implement.
But I do understand that after working with the same interface for a really long period, the new interface might mean some change for you. A few of you wrote to me that you need more education on the new interface. A couple of you found the interface a bit confusing.
This makes me think of an interesting change I made some time back. That was about my new mobile phone. My old phone had a crude interface, no profile setting and limited functionality. I wanted to use new features offered by the latest technology in the market. I evaluated and upgraded to a new phone. This new phone came with smart looks, new features and tools but getting used to it took me some time. Believe me, for initial two days, I used to keep the phone back in my drawer thinking that it’s difficult to learn, this is not for me. But gradually I started playing with the phone, explored the features, got help from product help and started enjoying the enhanced and new productivity benefits brought by this phone.
A month back, somebody asked me if I had a phone for donation. I searched and found the old phone. Out of curiosity, I inserted my SIM Card, charged the phone and started typing an SMS. Oh my God!! How difficult and cumbersome… I just couldn’t come to the agreement with truth that this was the phone I didn’t want to change. I smiled and said to myself… Mahesh! You made the right move of initiating, accepting and adjusting to the change which now I am enjoying thoroughly!
With newer technological developments, I might want to change to a newer phone in the future but I don’t have the fear of change as I know this only ‘constant’ will be for good only…
I am sure you would like to know more about the FrameMaker 9 User Interface. A small demo on working with conditional text through new UI is shown below.
RJ Jacquez, Senior Evangelist, will be explaining the new UI in detail to you. I recommend that you please attend his elearning session on Feb 26th.
This time FrameMaker Chautauqua conference didn’t materialize but I plan to be present at WritersUA in Seattle. We can discuss more on FrameMaker and Technical Communication Suite in person if you are attending the conference. We can plan a meeting in advance. You are always welcome to write to me at mahesh@adobe.com
Hello. It has been a long time since I last posted a blog entry. Needless to say, I have been very busy and you will appreciate the same when you try out the latest releases of Adobe RoboHelp 8, Adobe RoboHelp Server 8, Technical Communication Suite 2. Here are the quick links to try out the same:
Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 - www.adobe.com/go/trytcs Star Attraction - Adobe Photoshop CS4 is now part of TCS
Please note that you shall need to create an Adobe ID (if you don't have one already) for downloading the trial builds. All trial builds have full functionality and can be used for 30 days. If you decide to Buy, just specify the Serial Number in the Trail Build installation itself.
Since Trial build for TCS is a large binary, we prefer to post you a DVD than have you go through the pain of downloading it.
Click on the Product below to download the Getting Started Guides:
While you enjoy the features in the Trial build, you can refer to the Reviewer's Guide posted by Vivek Jain and Mahesh for getting an overview of the new features / workflows.
We plan to be more regular in blogging and hence I have termed this post as - "A New Beginning". It is very clear that I can't keep this blog alive alone from RoboHelp perspective and hence I have requested Vivek Kumar and Dhiren to join me.
Some of you know that Vivek Kumar is the Engineering Manager for RoboHelp, but one thing that you don't know is that he is a very good friend of mine and we have been working together in Adobe for good 5 years. Earlier we were together in the Acrobat Desktop team and then shifted to RoboHelp in 2006. I am sure you will enjoy his informative blog entries.
I am also pleased to share with you that Dhiren Manubhai Jani joined us a few weeks back in Product Management and I take this opportunity to introduce him to you.
I am also trying to persuade Sheetal Singh, QA Manager for RoboHelp to join our blog.
Adobe RoboHelp 8 has several exciting new features. First and foremost, Adobe RoboHelp 8 is now an XHTML Authoring Tool – that means, there is clean XHTML code editing in an visual environment. In addition, you can validate the code to assure World Wide Web Consortium compliance.
You can see the list of other new features below. To learn more, please click on the reviewer’s guide below. Reviewer’s guide also has several Captivate demos which illustrate some of these features. You may need to download the PDF to view these demos. You can also download the try it exercises.
Publishing Features – special enhancements for the end-user
Enhanced support for Adobe AIR – Adobe AIR™ technology provides a revolutionary new help application that provides many new ways for users to find information, add and share comments, in a system that is always up to date. It combines the best of the Web as well as the desktop, whether the user is online or not. Authors can generate this exciting new Adobe AIR help application and package it for easy deployment and management of automatic updates.
Powerful Search engine – Search results are ranked by relevance with the initial text of the topic for context, search highlighting, a synonym editor and a brand new Keyword Search that can be defined to help the user find what they are looking for. Also added is a way to define search Phrases as well as Substrings. Another major feature is that text in Adobe PDF and MS Office documents can be searched.
Enhanced Printed Documentation options – More flexibility in mapping your online output styles to the printed version in Microsoft® Word or Adobe PDF.
Breadcrumbs / Mini TOC – Breadcrumb navigation and/or a Mini TOC can be added with placeholders on a topic basis or with Master Pages. If preferred, breadcrumbs can be added globally with a single checkmark when generating output.
Improved Glossary – Glossary definitions which are edited are automatically updated in glossary hotspot links.
Merged Help implementation – Merged project enhancements provide a visually intuitive way to merge child projects which become part of a master TOC.
Twisties – Twisties provide both expanded and dropdown hotspots and can now have configurable images which provide a visual cue to the user.
More author-friendly enhancements
A new Styles and Formatting pod - Quickly apply, create or edit CSS styles.
World class Table, List and Autonumbering - Table designs (with many new prepared templates) can now be created or modified in the Styles editor using a graphical preview and exposed formatting tools. List support now includes enhanced handling of standard HTML Lists, MultiLevel lists and customizable autonumbering.
Easier import of MS® Word and Adobe FrameMaker files - Define common Import and Conversion Settings for consistent use of CSS and Style Mapping across all projects.
Linking MS® Word files -By linking to MS® Word files you can keep your content updated to the original source MS® Word document without re-importing each time.
Import DITA - Topic-based content into a RoboHelp HTML project. This allows the DITA author to take advantage of RoboHelp software’s rich feature set of TOC, Index, Glossary and advanced publishing options.
Enhanced Unicode and Language Support - There is now Unicode and language support at the topic and paragraph level.
FLV format now supported - For compelling eLearning and video presentations.
IFrame support - Include an external HTML or PDF inside a topic.
Single Sourcing Features - write once, distribute to many audiences
Brand new CSS Editor - Provides a graphical way to define Table Styles, and complex List Styles.
Master Pages (formerly Templates) - Help separate layout and styling from content. There are new placeholders for breadcrumbs and a “mini” Table of Contents and the Body section of each topic.
Resource Manager - Allows you to manage and reuse assets (including Images, Topics, Stylesheets, Multimedia and Snippets) across multiple Robohelp projects.
Formatted User-defined Variables (UDV) - Provide a robust way to make global changes to common blocks of content throughout many topics. A major new enhancement is the addition of formatting and the inclusion of such things as images and links which are easily created in a Design and HTML editor.
Productivity Features - Work quicker, smarter, more efficiently
Scripting - Automate with built-in scripts or create your own. The entire Adobe Extended Scripting Toolkit CS4 is included with Adobe RoboHelp 8, including many ready-made scripts to get you started.
Integration with other Adobe applications - Adobe Captivate 4, RoboScreenCapture and RoboSource Control are separate applications that are integrated into the Adobe RoboHelp 8 interface.
Custom To Do List - This popular RoboHelp favorite now allows you to edit the supplied tasks and add your own items depending on your own workflows.
Usability Features - making the work environment easier
Project Manager Enhancements - RoboHelp software’s strength has been its ability to help the author keep track of the many assets in a given project. Now, you can drag and drop topics and folders to create the same hierarchy used in the TOC. There is a choice to customize the list of files shown or switch to the traditional view with its virtual folders.
UI Enhancements - Color-coding to show pods with focus, easy close of topics in Design Editor, more tooltips on Navigation buttons and more robust right-click Context Menu support are some of the user-friendly changes to the interface.
Option to install RoboHelp for Word - You can now choose whether or not to install this application and create desktop icons. according to your preference.
Custom File Type mapping dialog - In addition to choosing your preferred HTML editor, there is an enhanced dialog to associate file extensions with your choice of applications.
More functionality added to existing features- Snippets can now be added to Popups and Drop-down hotspots and DHTML effects in non-IE browsers. Because of improved HHActiveX support, Glossaries and Browse Sequences can be included in the HTML Help (.chm) format in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) multibyte languages. Improvements have been also been made to Multiple TOC, Index and Glossary editing (including the ability to update Glossary definitions automatically.)
This blog represents the personal opinions of the Adobe Product Management Team and do not necessarily reflect the positions or opinions of Adobe. You should conduct independent assessments before basing any decision upon the statements made in this blog.
