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....@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 If I develop a rather large doc (~200pgs) in Robo, will I be sorely outdated?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