RoboHelp: Upgrade advice (summary)

["Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Earlier this week, I asked for advice about help authoring software.
I'm currently using RoboHelp (RH) 5.0 Office and asked whether I
should revert back to Word 6/RH4, with its set of familiar bugs and
workarounds; stand pat with Word97/RH5; or upgrade to RH6. I got the
following advice:

- RH 5 was fairly buggy, and upgrading to 5.5 or better is
recommended, though 5.5 was still not bug-free and is likely
unavailable by now.

- RH 6 is at least as stable as 4 and has tons of helpful features;
the main bugs (including autonumbering) seem to lie in Word, not RH
itself. The autonumbering bug remains enough of a problem to merit
turning this feature off entirely and manually numbering steps;
one person reported that even this may not work if you simply number
paragraphs tagged with the "Normal" style, so it's best to create a
separate "indented" style for your lists.

- RH6 has some nice features, such as drag and drop indexing
of keywords and the ability to list broken links and any graphics
used. However, the "dynamic WYSIWYG" feature is of questionable
utility, and slows working with the software. One person reported
that the default paragraph styles changed between versions to an
unacceptably small font size, and should be changed ASAP.

Thanks to Julie Badger, Jane Bergen, Connie Fabian-Isaacs, Melissa
Fisher, David Knopf, Janet Ring, Bill Swallow, and Jessica Weissman
for providing advice and war stories.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it."--Author unknown

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