Re: ForeHelp v. RoboHelp for "Single Source"

["Michele Marques" <mmarques -at- cms400 -dot- com>]

"Amy Janczy" <Amy_Janczy -at- uclid -dot- com> asked for a comparison 
on ForeHelp vs RoboHelp for Single Sourcing OnLine and printed 
documentation. 

I haven't used both, but I have developed help in ForeHelp and 
"created the manual" (RTF) with it, which I then imported into 
FrameMaker. It wasn't great, but it wasn't completely horrible.

ForeHelp seems best for single-sourcing multiple forms of OnLine 
help (e.g., Win '95/ HTML pages, or for related products, etc.). It 
does allow you to mark help topics, and any selection of 
information with one or more conditions, then build help (or the 
manual) that includes all conditions that you select. I believe that 
you can also define the order of topics for the manual, separately 
from the order of topics in your help "contents" and help file.

I believe that the manual would still need some tweaking, but if you 
imported it into FrameMaker, you might be able to import formats  
to handle things automatically.

Note that ForeHelp 2000 is supposed to be able to import MIF files -
 if you work with FrameMaker, you might want to ask if it can 
export MIF files, as well.

It is also possible to develop documents in either Word or 
FrameMaker to import into ForeHelp. Whether you choose to 
develop in Word/FM or ForeHelp would depend on your working 
style, as well as which was more important (or less standard).


-------------------------------------------------------
Michele Marques
Lead Technical Communicator, CMS Manufacturing Systems
mmarques -at- cms400 -dot- com        
905-477-4499 x280