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Subject:RE: Single Sourcing With RoboHELP From:Sean Brierley <sbri -at- haestad -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 22 Jan 2002 07:57:00 -0500
Greetings from the Digest!
Actually, this very issue was discussed on the Help Authoring Tools and
Techniques list (HATT, search for it at yahoogroups.com). Darren Barefoot
wrote an excellent article about single-sourcing with RoboHelp for the
December, 2001, issue of Intercom. While I disagree that Darren has achieved
single-sourcing through his method, he seems to have gotten pretty close.
However, for the most part, in dabbling in RoboHelp 9.2 and having been a
RoboHelp 6 junkie, I find that RoboHelp supports repurposing very well but
not single sourcing. In my opinion, using RoboHelp ultimately results in the
creation of more than one source document and the need to synchronize more
than one document as your documents evolve with newer versions of your
product.
Like David, I successfully single source using FrameMaker and WebWorks
Publisher.
Cheers,
Sean
(See, isn't this much better than that lame-o Dungeons and Dragons thread? I
had to struggle hard not to wade in on that one. ;?)
Subject: RE: Single Sourcing With RoboHELP
From: "David Knopf" <david -at- knopf -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 07:37:21 -0800
X-Message-Number: 18
Bruce Cox wrote:
| I'm soon to begin work documentating a product that requires
| online help,
| along with user and reference guides. I see that RoboHELP
| includes a single
| sourcing feature that purportedly allows you to create
| printed docs from the
| various RoboHELP files.
|
| I'm wondering if anybody has anybody has had success with
| this method or if
| there is a better way to go. I expect to be using the latest
| versions of
| both RoboHELP and Word. Thanks,
David Knopf wrote:
RoboHelp does not really support single sourcing when one of the target
output formats is printed documentation (or PDFs). What RoboHelp does
allow you to do is *export* the content you've written RoboHelp to a
Word .doc file. You can then adjust, edit, reformat, and tweak this .doc
file as necessary to produce your printed documentation. The post-export
adjustments can take a considerable amount of time if you have
significant amount of content.
<snip>
We use RoboHelp a lot and consider an excellent tool for online Help
authoring. For true single source projects, however, we generally use
FrameMaker and WebWorks Publisher. I am told that Author-It also
supports true single sourcing, but I've not had the chance to put this
tool through its paces and therefore can't comment on how well it works.
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