Current Online help standard

[Ridder, Fred]

And to address one issue that Art did not talk about:
RoboHelp is not "on its way out". The ownership of the
company that publishes RoboHelp did change a couple 
of times (eHelp was bought by Macromedia, and then
Macromedia was bought by Adobe), and along the way
most of the original developers left.  But this spring at 
the WinWriters conference, Adobe did something that
is completely unprecedented for them: they publicly 
indicated that they were working on a new version of 
RoboHelp with a target release date in the first half of
2007. Whether this is too little, too late is a question
for the marketplace to answer. But Adobe believes the
product itself is still viable and are investing resources
in it.   

The one thing that is (arguably) on its way out is the
long-in-the-tooth Windows Help (.hlp) format. The new
Vista operating system will not include the WinHelp 
engine, and it is still unclear whether a Vista-compatible
WinHelp viewer will be available for download from 
Microsoft. The only flavor of application help that is 
officially supported on Vista is HTML Help (.chm). 
Vista itself has a new type of help, which is initially 
only available for in-house use within Microsoft and 
which may or may not eventually be made available 
to third-party application developers.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder (fred dot ridder at intel dot com)
Intel
Parsippany, NJ


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+fred.ridder=intel.com at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+fred.ridder=intel.com at lists.frameusers.com] On
Behalf Of Art Campbell
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 3:23 PM
To: Susan Curtzwiler
Cc: FrameMaker
Subject: Re: Current Online help standard

There isn't a "standard" anything for online help. Depends on your
application, OS, and your inclinations. You may want to review
http://hat-matrix.com/ for ideas.

My own preference is to single source in FM and output to OmniHelp or
HTML help through omsys.com's MIF2Go plug-in. Other people prefer to
use Webworks, usually the Pro version, to extract from FM.

Art

On 12/5/06, Susan Curtzwiler <smcurtzwiler at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Please, what is the current standard for online help?
>   Is this now built into FrameMaker? Can I use 7.0 or do I need 7.2?
>
>   I've heard that RoboHelp is on its way out. If I develop a rather
large doc (~200pgs) in Robo, will I be sorely outdated?
>
>   Thanks,
>   Sue