Adobe Updates RoboHelpAdobe Updates RoboHelp

Adobe Systems Inc. on Tuesday released Adobe RoboHelp 6, software for publishing desktop and Web-based help systems.

RoboHelp, a product that came to Adobe through the company's acquisition of Macromedia, is aimed at three categories of user, according to Karl Matthews, group product marketing manager at Adobe. "The largest category is the professional technical writer," said Matthews. "The second is really the software developer, the guy who's not a professional writer by trade but nonetheless has to produce documentation. And finally there's a group of people using RoboHelp to create knowledge bases [in companies]."

Don Walker, senior director of product marketing and business development at Adobe, said in a statement that RoboHelp 6 "reinforces Adobe's commitment to the technical communications market, giving authors what they need to easily develop, manage and maintain intuitive software help systems and knowledge bases."

RoboHelp 6 has been designed to facilitate the creation of help systems, knowledge bases, and various kinds of documentation for computer desktop environments. RoboHelp Server 6 is aimed at delivering and updating online help content. The two products complement other Adobe technical software including Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Captivate, and Adobe Acrobat.

The focus of the new version, said Matthews, is "adding things to make people more productive and to improve the quality of output. We made a big upgrade to how PDF is published, and we upgraded the Flash technology to work with our RoboHelp server."

Other new features include the ability to compile help systems from the command line without launching the RoboHelp application, automated "wizards" to create tables of contents, indexes and glossaries, new screen capture editing tools, and improved multimedia support, to name a few.

RoboHelp Server 6 has been designed to develop help systems using the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Users of RoboHelp or RoboHelp Server can import content created in Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, XML and other formats and convert it for output to FlashHelp, HTML, JavaHelp, WebHelp, WinHelpOracleHelp for Java, or print, via Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word.