Single Sourcing in RoboHelp

Technical Communication is published in multiple formats, HTML, FlashHelp, WebHelp, Print, PDF, Hosted Online Help and a host of other formats. End-users of knowledge bases, documentation, regulatory notices etc. want to access information in multiple formats and single sourcing has enabled this now at a low cost.

RoboHelp is a well recognized leader in Single Sourcing. RoboHelp has Conditional Build Tags (CBT) with highly visual color indicators, conditional build expressions, custom structure of print documents, single source layouts and batch generation capabilities (you may want to view this article by Matthew Ellison). RoboHelp also enables you to preview the output for a specific conditional build expression (you know what you are getting).

When we started work on Adobe RoboHelp 6, it was clear to the team that we needed to further enhance this functionality. Conditional build tags for Table of Content and Indexes were identified as important new features. In addition, you can apply conditional tags to folders and to rows or columns in a table. Several enhancements have also been made to color coding for conditional text.

PDF creation was also identified as an area of major improvement. Since this was going to be the first release of RoboHelp from Adobe, it was imperative for us to improve the PDF creation. In Adobe RoboHelp 6, you can generate a PDF with hyperlinks, bookmarks and all the features you would expect from the best PDF creation tool.

The feedback on the above has been good. At the same time, there is always scope for improvement. If you have more ideas on how this can be improved, do drop in a feature enhancement request.