This is the second of a series of four reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. Unlike the Adobe Creative Suite, the Technical Communication Suite is geared for technical communicators, help authors, instructional designers, and training professionals. The suite contains four products: FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, and Acrobat 3D. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information about what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe RoboHelp 7? You need Windows, an Intel Pentium 4, Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 or Vista, 850 MB of hard drive space, and a DVD-ROM drive.

Adobe RoboHelp 7 is a help authoring tool that was originally developed by eHelp corporation in 1991 and was acquired by Macromedia in October of 2003. It was acquired by Adobe Corporation in December 2005 when it acquired Macromedia. When RoboHelp 6 was released in January 2007, it was to less than stellar fanfare. Nine months later, in October 2007, version 7 was released as a major upgrade. It is also included in the November 2007 release of the Technical Communication Suite.

Adobe RoboHelp 7 is an integral part of the Technical Communication Suite. The three core areas of use for RoboHelp are for online help for applications (used for both desktop and web-based applications); free-standing knowledge bases (this being useful for policies and procedures, user manuals, call center, and help desk support); and it also works in concert with Adobe Captivate to create eLearning systems.

With RoboHelp 7 you can create content from existing projects or import content from HTML, XML, Adobe PDF, FrameMaker or Microsoft Word documents. RoboHelp splits properly tagged information into help topics and keeps existing tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries. It has wizards and topic templates to help you build help systems more quickly. It has single sourcing output so that you can author once and publish to many different formats. It even has the ability to let you collaborate with other authors.

So what's new with Adobe RoboHelp 7?

• Unicode Support and Translation Workflow Support – you can now author, edit, and spell check content, topics, tables of content, indexes, and glossaries in multiple languages. RoboHelp 7 supports authoring in 35 languages including Asian and European languages

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is software developer, a writer, and a photographer. He also blogs at PhotographyTodayNet and is building a blog about the development of a state-of-the-art Green Dream Home in Oklahoma.

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