RoboHelp 8, as was RoboHelp 7, is a significant upgrade. Whereas the former was more about updating the interface and how the user works with the program, this release is more about creating a more productive work environment. By adding the ability to link to not only FrameMaker, but now Microsoft Word to RoboHelp projects, you gain more options for your workflow.
What's new with Adobe RoboHelp 8?
Adobe AIR now allows you to publish your help system as an Adobe AIR application with support for adding tabs, favorites, new templates, and auto generated mini table of contents. This provides you with many new ways for users to find information as well as add and share comments in a system that is always up to date. Authors can generate this AIR application and package it for easy deployment.
Powerful Search Engine gives you enhanced search results with ranking, wildcard, metadata, and multiple language results. Search results are ranked by relevance with the initial text of the topic for content, search highlighting, a synonym editor and a keyword search that can be defined to help the user find what they are looking for. Another feature is that Adobe PDF's and Microsoft Office documents can be searched as well.
Enhanced Printed Document options give you the ability to map your online output styles to the printed versions in Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF. You have the ability to use MS Word Templates or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Breadcrumbs and mini TOC provide the ability to customize the home page name, separators, and add labels. Now breadcrumbs can appear in topics that are not in the main table-of-contents (TOC). A mini TOC can be added with placeholders on a topic basis or with master pages.
Improved Glossary which are edited are automatically updated in glossary hotspot links. This makes it even easier to make sure that your users have all the needed information at their fingertips.
Merged Help implementation lets RoboHelp authors to break up content into logical subsets as individual projects. Then at runtime, the projects are automatically merged into a single Contents/Index/Search that is much more seamless to the user. It gives you a visually intuitive way to merge child projects which become part of a master TOC.
Twisties give you the ability to layer information and help the user avoid scrolling in long topics. You can now add graphical clues to alert the user that a dropdown hotspot may be expanded to reveal more information
XHTML standards and support implements full support for XHTML standard including the ability to check your content for World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliance.
