Current Online help standard

[Rick Quatro]

Adobe also announced an upcoming version of RoboHelp (and FrameMaker) at the 
recent FrameMaker Chautauqua.

Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing
585-659-8267
www.frameexpert.com


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