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The RoboColum(n)

Who is the “RoboColum(n)” ?

My name is Colum McAndrew, a Senior Technical Writer working for IDBS in Guildford, UK. Before admitting to being a Technical Writer, I was an Account Manager for a computer bureau servicing the advertising industry. A large part of this role was the production of technical training materials for the classroom led courses held in the company’s training suite as well as ad-hoc on-site customer training.

Why does The RoboColum(n) exist ?

As a senior member of the Adobe RoboHelp forums, I saw that certain questions came up again and again. Whilst the forums could be searched by users, it can be difficult to find the required answers among the sometimes confused content and often numerous questions. As such I decided in early 2009 to compile a list of such questions and post the answers in a blog format. Subjects covered include all applications in the Adobe Technical Communications Suite (namely RoboHelp, Captivate, FrameMaker and Acrobat) plus more general subject matter for the Technical Communications industry as a whole.

Why The RoboColum(n) ?

The idea came from my friend and fellow Adobe RoboHelp user Rick Stone. He started a site some years ago called the Robowizard focusing on his use of Adobe RoboHelp and later Adobe Captivate. To this day it is a useful compilation of tips and tricks for fellow Technical Communicators.

The “RoboColum(n)’s” Experience

A user of Adobe RoboHelp since 1999 (version 9.1) I can frequently be found on that product’s support forums where fellow users seek help from other professionals. I also use other Adobe products (e.g. Captivate, FrameMaker, Acrobat) as well as many other applications useful to technical communicators.

I am also acknowledged as one of the UK’s experts on the Adobe RoboHelp Server feedback analytics application. I’ve used that product since version 6 and participated in all the beta tests for both RoboHelp Server and RoboHelp since 2006. This blog is one of the few portals for knowledge on RoboHelp Server.

I am also a member of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (MISTC).

RoboColum(n) Accolades

  • Pat Trostle

    Colum,
    I’m new to tech writing, but have 10 years of print journalism as background.

    In your opinion, how may I best learn RoboHelp 8 (it’s installed on my computer) from the ground up?

    Thanks,

    Pat

    • http://notcolin.wordpress.com/ Colum McAndrew

      Hi Pat.

      The user interface of RoboHelp 8 is fairly familiar to users of Microsoft Word so I think that you could do a lot worse than roll your sleeves up and get stuck in. There are a couple of sample projects installed in the “My RoboHelp Projects” sub-folder of your My Documents folder that you can play with. If you want to create a new project this is easily done from the Starter wizard that is launched when you start RoboHelp 8.

      Any RoboHelp project is made up of different elements (e.g. topics, images, TOC, Index, etc.) that are very easy to add and manipulate once you get the hang of things. You may have an idea of what you are trying to achieve which is a good place to start. Do you have a structure, style, appearance that you are trying to achieve? Where will your output reside? These are the sort of questions that you need to have answers for further down the line but for now, just get dirty!

      By all means go on a course to fine tune your knowledge. There are a number of companies offering these depending on where you live. It is also well worth looking through the support forums (see the link above) which are frequented by lots of friendly and knowledgeable users who can help with more specific queries.

      Colum

      • michelle leary

        Hello, Colum.
        We are a bit behind the times, but we are finally upgrading our projects from RoboHelp X5 to RoboHelp 8. Help! We have about 40 projects in X5 that we are publishing to the RoboHelp Server v4 (so we’ll be using the latest version of RoboServer, too) (webhelppro output). These are merged projects with all sorts of cross links between projects.

        Do you have any tips or advice for proceeding? Are there any big “gotchas” that I should look out for? And/or do you have any resources/sites you can point me to that will help me map this migration out.

        Thank you so much for any information.
        Michelle

        • http://notcolin.wordpress.com/ Colum McAndrew

          Hi Michelle.

          You are not THAT behind the times as it was only nine months ago that we were in a similar position. We are now using RH8 and RH Server 8 with 13 merged projects, outputting WebHelp Pro and CHM files as a backup.

          There are a lot of resources out there, check out the RoboColum(n) Cloud, as well as the RoboHelp forums. in summary, avoid using any special characters in file names otherwise you’ll get unexpected results on the server. Also generate output to a shared drive if you work in a multi-author environment. This makes it a whole lot easier to add links as you always know you are picking up the latest version. I’d also recommend you use Peter Grainge’s merged webhelp structure as outlined here:

          http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/merging_webhelp/merging_method_rh8.htm

          There’s lots more stuff which I plan to post on this blog in future weeks. Watch this space.

  • siobhan macdonald

    Hi Colum,

    You come highly recommended by Ivan Walsh at Klariti. I’m hoping you can help! I’ve been tech writing for a long time – the late eighties to be exact but have encountered some problems with Framemaker (9) that you may be able to help with. I’m revisiting Framemaker after a number of years absence having worked with Word in the meantime. I’m quite surprised at some of the things it can’t do. For example, I spent days trying to figure out why a transparent gif wasn’t transparent when I imported it into Framemaker. It kept importing with a solid white block behind it. I then found a technical note hidden away in Adobe that transparency isn’t supported as Framemaker needs to support wraparound text at the expense of transparency! I’m unimpressed.

    My current problem arose as I’m trying to develop a doc for the US English market and the international English market. I thought I’d approach it as follows:
    Include the US and International versions of a spelling.
    Make the text conditional.
    Spell check using a US dictionary or using an International dictionary.
    However, when you install Framemaker, you install one dictionary only. I can’t see a way to install 2 versions and then select one to check against. Perhaps my approach is wrong. I’d appreciate a steer on this as I imagine it’s a fairly commonplace scenario.

    Any advice would be appreciated,

    Siobhan.

    • http://notcolin.wordpress.com/ Colum McAndrew

      Hi Siobhan.

      It is kind of Ivan to say such things about me although I am not really a FM expert. I do use it but I am better known as a RoboHelp expert. However you would seem to be attacking your problem the right way. I too would use conditional text and from what I know of FM I think you have two options.

      The first would be to set the language you wish to spell check against in the Character Designer. This will be set by default to what you installed first of all. Let’s say this is set to UK English, when you spell check it finds the US words misspelled. Just ignore these. When you have finished checking your UK English, change the language in the Character Designer to US English and recheck.

      A second option would be to stick with just one language (e.g. UK English) but add all the US English spellings to your personal dictionary. When FM does a spell check it uses different dictionaries with the language and personal dictionaries being the two main ones. This is probably my preferred option as it negates having to spell check twice. The only down side is having to add the US spellings to your personal dictionary.

  • siobhan macdonald

    Hi Colum, Thanks for the prompt reply that’s great. I did have another query on the Framemaker dictionaries that’s quite strange. I’m trying to add scientific characters such as omega and mu to the dictionary but Framemaker says that this is not allowed. I found a tech note on the adobe site to say that a fix was available for this problem so I downloaded the 237 build and the 230 build and am currently at the 250 build of Framemaker 9. Unfortunately, I still get the same message. I rang Adobe tech support but they couldn’t help and didn’t know why it didn’t work. Any suggestions? Have you encountered this problem?

    Thanks again,

    Siobhan.

    • http://notcolin.wordpress.com/ Colum McAndrew

      Siobhan you are really stretching my FM knowledge here. To be honest I’m not sure what could be going wrong. We have struggled with similar scenarios inside RoboHelp where we had mathematical equations that could not be spell checked. We ended up inseting images. Hardly a pretty solution but it may work for you.

  • http://mesothelioma-information.info M. Case

    You come highly recommended by Ivan Walsh at Klariti. I’m hoping you can help! I’ve been tech writing for a long time – the late eighties to be exact but have encountered some problems with Framemaker (9) that you may be able to help with. I’m revisiting Framemaker after a number of years absence having worked with Word in the meantime. I’m quite surprised at some of the things it can’t do. For example, I spent days trying to figure out why a transparent gif wasn’t transparent when I imported it into Framemaker. It kept importing with a solid white block behind it. I then found a technical note hidden away in Adobe that transparency isn’t supported as Framemaker needs to support wraparound text at the expense of transparency! I’m unimpressed.
    +1

    • http://notcolin.wordpress.com/ The RoboColum(n)

      It is kind of Ivan to recommend me. Personally I don’t regard myself as a FrameMaker expert. Whilst I have used FrameMaker, I am better known for my RoboHelp knowledge. However in this case I am able to help.

      Unfortunately for you in this case, it is true that transparent images are not supported. The logic here is that FrameMaker images are contained in a frame that can be positioned anywhere inside the text. As such the text can wraparound the image.

      Obviously I don’t know exactly what you are trying to achieve but there maybe a workaround. If you want to let me know, I can see if I can help further. Alternatively you could try posting a query to the product forums which is an extremely good resource:

      http://forums.adobe.com/community/framemaker