An Easy “How To” session on Merged Help
Many people who move into powerful Help Authoring solutions like RoboHelp 10 eventually reach the point where they have perhaps a dozen related Help projects which they wish to deliver as a single package. It is possible to merge multiple Help projects into one seamless library.
Lightext Inc.’s Beth Gerber recently made a guest webinar appearance with Adobe Tech Comm in which she shared a highly effective step-by-step demo of how to create merged Help with RoboHelp 10. This blog summarizes key points from that webinar, but you may view a recording of “Merged Help Magic with RoboHelp10” by clicking here.
What is Merged Help?
- Large amount of content
- Content currently resides:
- in one project or
- multiple projects published separately
- Multiple authors
- Active updates
- Examples
- Policy and procedure
- Internal user guides
Beth shared a very logical definition that framed her demo:
- Multiple RoboHelp projects
- Used by one general audience
- Single Webhelp output produces a combined
- TOC
- Index
- Glossary
- Skin
Why use Merged Help?
- Large amount of content
- Content currently resides:
- in one project or
- multiple projects published separately
- Multiple authors
- Active updates
- Examples
- Policy and procedure
- Internal user guides
The following screen capture from Beth’s slides includes a good example of organization for Merged Help:
https://blogsimages.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2012/12/01-shot-org-chart1.jpg
Summary of steps shared through demo of RoboHelp 10 Merged Help
- Create a parent project
- Merge child projects into the parent project
- Set up the first page redirect
- Create links between projects
- Run the merged webhelp output
- Test the output
- Develop topics for an instructional project including, What’s New, Helpful Hints, and Revision pages.
- Manage the merged help system
Have your own hands-on with RoboHelp 10 and decide how you can use it
After watching the webinar, you may wish to have your own hands-on with RoboHelp. The quickest way to do this is to have use a trial copy of Tech Comm Suite 4, which includes FrameMaker 11 and RoboHelp 10. You can try your own hands-on by clicking here. This link also includes a link to a Quick Start Guide for RoboHelp.