RoboHelp 11 is here !
Hello Everyone,
Wish you all, a very happy and prosperous new year 2014!
As we begin the New Year, I am pleased to announce the availability of RoboHelp 11, the latest version of RoboHelp product. In this release, we have introduced new innovative workflows and enhanced several existing ones. RoboHelp 11 enables authors to quickly publish their content for mobile consumption, create visually stunning printed documentation, and collaborate effectively and seamlessly with fellow writers and SMEs. In this blog, I would elaborate on some of the key features in RoboHelp 11.
A new color scheme for the User Interface
The first thing you’ll notice, when you open up RoboHelp 11, is a sparkling new user interface! It combines a new high contrast color scheme, and crisper color combinations with the familiar labels and functions that make RoboHelp 11 so easy to use.
New, single click Responsive HTML5 publishing workflow to easily & quickly publish your content for mobile consumption
https://blogsimages.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2014/01/Responsive-Layout.png
In this era of device explosion, when more and more content consumption is happening on smartphones and tablet devices, it has become extremely important for content creators to publish their content for mobile. In our survey of tech comm industry, we found that, while back in 2012 only 15% tech comm departments were publishing for mobile, the number grew to 37% in 2013. Clearly, mobile publishing is on the rise and is one of the prominent trends in the tech comm circles.
In RoboHelp 10, we had launched Multiscreen HTML5 publishing workflow, which was really liked by many of our customers. Over the last year or so, we have been listening to the feedback from our valued partners and customers and I am pleased to announce that we have greatly simplified the mobile publishing workflow with our new Responsive HTML5 layouts based publishing.
Responsive HTML5 layouts are easy to work with because there is only one layout which morphs automatically and adjusts tables, images and navigation elements depending on screen size. This is especially handy for authors, who want to reuse legacy content to accommodate all the new device screen sizes.
With Responsive HTML5 publishing, only one layout is used regardless of the device. If the user is viewing on a desktop, they will see one arrangement of the components of the screen, if they are viewing on say an iPhone or Android phone, they will see the components resized and rearranged in a layout to better suit that device. Your Adobe RoboHelp output takes care of all that with one click.
RoboHelp 11 ships 2 new Responsive HTML5 Layouts out of the box. These layouts can be easily customized with the new wizard based layout editor.
In summary, RoboHelp 11 will come with 2 flavors of HTML5, Responsive and Multiscreen. The authors will have the power to decide which workflow to use depending on their needs.
See the video below to learn more
http://tv.adobe.com/embed/1438/21788/
Create your company branded printed documentation with custom Headers and Footers
Even though the mobile publishing adoption is growing at a rapid pace, most of the authors still publish to WORD/PDF, and these formats are here to stay. In this release, we have greatly improved the printed documentation outputs.
First of all, you can now create WORD/PDF outputs with custom headers and footers. This functionality is enabled using the Master Page feature in RoboHelp. Now you can easily define headers and footers in a Master Page and apply that Master Page to a printed documentation SSL. The headers and footers, defined in the Master Page, will be applied in the WORD/PDF outputs. To make the workflow easier, we have also provided a way to import the headers and footers from existing WORD documents so that you don’t have to recreate them as per your corporate branding.
RoboHelp 11 gives you the option to associate different Master Pages for first, odd, and even pages. And you can define different combination for different sections like Chapters, TOC, Index, Glossary etc.
The other big enhancement in printed documentation is that RoboHelp 11 supports SWF file format in published WORD/PDF outputs. This has been one of the wish-list from many RoboHelp authors, who are now using rich multimedia content such as videos, product simulation and interactive elearning content to engage the users.
Apart from these major enhancements in printed documentation, we also fixed most of bugs reported in earlier RoboHelp releases.
See the video below to learn more
http://tv.adobe.com/embed/1438/21791/
Seamlessly collaborate with SMEs and fellow writers, using the new topic sharing workflows and integration with popular cloud storage services
https://blogsimages.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2014/01/Cloud-Services.png
The extent of collaboration in the tech pubs department is on the rise. 30% of the respondents in Adobe survey said so. Today, a technical writer is collaborating with ~ 9 SMEs on average. We realized that there might be a big opportunity in designing a solution which enables real-time collaboration with peers across geographies.
I am delighted to announce that RoboHelp 11 provides you that capability with the new Topic Sharing with cloud-based synchronization workflow that assures your authoring team is always “in sync” as you share common assets such as topics, images, style sheets, multimedia, and more.
One of the biggest challenges in sharing topics is that there are multiple resource files. The new workflow in RoboHelp 11 is smart enough to identify all the resource files and share them automatically. Once the topics are used across projects, the authors can move the resource files in any folder within their projects. RoboHelp 11 smartly detects the path changes and keeps all files in sync.
See the video below to learn more
http://tv.adobe.com/embed/1438/21790/
In addition, there are a number of other new features such as Captivate 7 integration, Office 2013 and Windows 8.1 support, TOC based browse sequences, and many more. For more detailed information on few features and workflow, please refer the following links
If you would like to see what people have said about the new release, click here for a consolidated list of reviews.
I would encourage all of you to download RoboHelp 11 trial and experience the exciting new workflows. I will be doing a webinar on 6th Feb 2014 from 8 – 10 am US PST, where I will talk about all these new features and show you live demos. I welcome you all to join me and register for the same here.
In the coming weeks and months, I will be starting a blog series, in which I will post more details on the new features in RoboHelp 11. So stay tuned.
Best Regards,
Vikram Verma
Product Manager, Adobe Technical Communication Products