What our customer's say!"Manages Straight Help Files Just Fine..", I've been working with the X5 version now for six months. What it does really well is manage a great many files for various outputs, htm, chm, flash. It's pdf output is rather pathetic, though. I end up printing to WORD and then editing from there. If you use Robohelp to print to PDF, you lose all links in the document.
where it is extremely buggy is in version control. We're using RCS system, and so far my 1600 + help system has crashed twice.. with no apparent reason. This last time it just divorced itself from version control.
Indexing and TOC features are easy to use, and for plain writers that need to present a lot of information with simple bells and whistles, Robohelp does provide a lot of versatility.
The note of caution, though, is back up regularly.
"Functions like a Beta release", Want support for JavaHelp? Forget it. RoboHelp claims to support JavaHelp, but only supports some of it.
For example, I had to write a utility to "massage" the resulting JavaHelp build xml files because RoboHelp does not recognize multiple controls pointing to a single JavaHelp topic. (No, aliases do not work for JavaHelp.)
Also, neither JavaHelp 1.x nor 2.x recognizes all the formatting codes inserted by RoboHelp. For example, plain old HTML bold tags display properly; RoboHelp's bold style does not. What's the use of using a style then?
Did this company even test the product? I don't think so. In fact, when I used one of my two "freebie" support tickets to force the issue about the multiple control/single topic issue, Macromedia admitted, after sending me a lot of irrelevant material about using aliases, that this was a known bug and there were no plans to fix it.
Want frustrating error-prone version control? Just use RoboHelp's built-in crash-a-rama RoboSource, the program that continually provides errors. Oh, I can get it working, sometimes even for days at a stretch; then it'll start its crashing again, where I have to repeatedly reboot my server, a machine we've had to dedicate to RoboSource. RoboHelp doesn't work with CVS, the version control system we use inhouse, though Macromedia claims it works with SourceSafe. I'll never know, though, because I've learned over the years not to trust Macromedia.
Want support for Eclipse? Forget about it. Doesn't exist.
Perhaps for users who only need to single-source a simple documentation set, such as a WinHelp system coupled with a Word document, this product would work just fine. I'll never know, because the documentation community should be heading in the same direction as the application community: cross-platform compatibility.
I could list other problems and workarounds, but what's the point? I recommend looking elsewhere, depending on your documentation needs. I know I will.
The next sound you hear will be the installation CDs hitting my trash can, and the tapping of my keys as I take this opportunity to find another product....
"Overpriced and very disappointing.", ADDITION TO MY REVIEW: After updating an old Help project for a Java application, I learned that this version of RoboHelp automatically and without warning changes all map IDs to a different form than the older version, with NO provision in RoboHelp X5 for generating IDs in the old format. Solution: go in and manually change all the map IDs to the old format. This is INEXCUSABLE and makes upgrading from an old version of RoboHelp A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY.
And get this: If you have two topic files with the same name IN DIFFERENT FOLDERS, the properties box for each file shows the map IDs for BOTH files, with no indication which ID is actually assigned to each file. Really helpful.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: There is very little that is "robo" (i.e., automated) about RoboHelp. Sure, it will auto-generate things when you ask it to, but its output is so erratic and incomplete you might as well do it all by hand.
As a manual Help creation tool, it's got a nice complement of features, but let me tell you about a couple of little quirks or bugs...
You're supposed to be able to switch the type of output you get from RoboHelp at any point in your project. We started out with the goal of producing WebHelp, then switched to MS HTML help. Well, the part where you define what's available in your final output (Window definitions) did not come along for the switch. It took some time to realize that we had to delete the window definitions and define new ones in order for RoboHelp to actually produce the output we wanted.
Another little quirk is that when you add a hyperlink to existing text in a bulleted list, RoboHelp throws in a bunch of space characters (from 3 to 10) between the bullet and the text. And the WYSIWYG editor is not really WYSIWYG, not that that's any surprise, but it won't allow you to do everything you want to do. There is a TrueCode editor to let you get around that, if you know your way around HTML.
A new quirk that I've been wrestling with this morning is that any edit to an existing topic changes the style for that topic, and RoboHelp will not allow me to change it back, even when I edit the HTML directly!
Workarounds, more workarounds, and living with things you can't work around--expect to spend a lot of time developing your project's Help file with RoboHelp.
"Highway Robbery", This is nothing more than the basic RoboHelp with many more bells and whistles. It's not worth a grand; not now, not ever.
Reminds me of automobiles: they're all the same, four wheels and a horn. They all do the same thing. But start adding features and the price starts climbing.
I think it's the height of arrogance to charge a grand for this software. Just so long as this type of arrogance marks the software industry, then just so long will I in my secret heart cheer on the software pirates.
