2017 Release of RoboHelp (Update 2)

Just a few days ago we released Update 2 for Adobe RoboHelp 2017. In this second update since the launch of RoboHelp 2017 on January 31, we have incorporated a number of enhancements and ironed out a lot of smaller glitches. I would like to extend big thanks to all those who’ve contributed by reporting issues and helping us improve the product.

The official change log is available here.

In this post:

What’s new and Better

Publishing

Improved Responsive HTML5 layouts
A host of improvements have been introduced in all Responsive HTML5 layouts. If you are using an earlier version of any layout in RoboHelp (2017 release), it is strongly recommended to create and use the new layout for your project. One of the major enhancement in the current update is the support for displaying complete layout in context-sensitive Help.
If you are using RoboHelp (2015 release), you can easily upgrade your older layouts by following the instructions given in Upgrade RoboHelp (2015 release) responsive HTML5 layout to RoboHelp (2017 release) article.
We have fixed some design issues with the Table of Contents (TOC). In certain situations, some TOC entries were overlapping each other. Now the TOCs shine in all beauty.
We did a couple of fixes for the Indigo Theme. The Favorite panel and the breadcrumb links work like a charm now.
The sidebar expand/collapse icons have been repositioned to center nicely in the section.
Flexibility to print an individual topic is now available as well as fixed around printing long topics across various layouts.
A lot of people have asked us to make it easier to print out a single topic in the published Responsive HTML5 help. Yes, it’s an online help. And yes, it’s even responsive. And yes, a lot of people want to print out a topic. And we heard a lot of good explanations why people want to print out a topic in certain circumstances. And so we listened and discussed it and: Did it. Enjoy!
In the Responsive HTML5 outputs in Japanese, some cross-references (日本語) and glossary terms that were shown as pop-ups had some bugs. Done and fixed.
When you preview a topic (Responsive HTML5 output) in RoboHelp, the preview window was giving some scripting errors. That’s a thing of the past now.
Oh, this beautiful Microsoft Surface Pro! The Responsive HTML5 Online Help published with RoboHelp 2017 looks now even more beautiful on this masterpiece. Also because of some text-size fixes and tweeking we did in the CSS.

Even better Search for your customers

Searching through your published Responsive HTML5 Helps just become much more powerful. Your customers can use AND / OR and NOT operators in their search string and the found words will be highlighted according to the logic.
For Responsive HTML5 layouts, by default an “AND” search is performed when multiple words are entered in the search box. When they enter “OR” results are also shown now accordingly.
Your users can now also do a substring search. This will give them even better search result from your online help. Of course, you can activate and deactivate, if you want to enable substring search.
Your help users experienced problems in big help portals with search? We scaled that up, and search now also works if you have more than 500 indexed keywords.
One help documentation is not enough? No one knows better than we do … That’s why we have improved the possibility to extend the search over all merged projects in the Responsive HTML5 output.
We have improved the support for Unicode in all fields for better search results and fixed some Unicode-related bugs in TOC, Index, and Glossary.

The text wrap feature now also works smoothly with mp4 files.
Loading topics with a lot of conditional tags now also just works in merged projects.
Importing MS Word Docs regularily? Those containing also Table of Contents entries? We have fixed a couple of bugs regarding TOC Entries. Importing Word Docs just got a little bit smoother.
We added the Copyright element in the language files. Just a small character, but a big step for those who need it.

Other Fixes

Cross-site scripting and open redirect vulnerabilities found in the WebHelp output have been fixed.
In addition, we have fixed a couple of crashes and problems reported by users:

- Gone it is, this crash when all topics in the Master Project were set to exclude from search.
- In a merged project, topics were not loaded with conditional build tags. Fixed.
- Fonts! We love them! You love them. Customers love them. And now you added many of them to your custom CSS with @font-face? And then it crashed? We could not accept that, so we fixed it. Now you can use fonts just as you like!

And that’s not everything. We fixed a few more bugs in the background … but we do not need to give away all of our secrets here, right?

Apart from above fixes and improvements, Ocean Layout is no longer supported in SSL Gallery but can be downloaded from Screen Profiles and Layout page. Also, Home (Custom Icons) component in the Indigo layout is no longer available and to customize the landing page icons, you can use CSS route. You can also view the RoboHelp (2017 release) Update 2 readme here.

How to get Update 2 for RoboHelp (2017 release)

Getting the update is as easy. Just select File > Help > Updates from RoboHelp’s main menu to fire up the Adobe Update Manager (AUM) to download and install the update.

Want to download the update to deploy it to all your RoboHelp installations without downloading it on every machine? We understand this. That’s why you can find all update packages for download also for direct dowload on our Adobe RoboHelp Serivce Releases website.

After the update, the RoboHelp version will be 13.0.2.334. That’s good to know, isn’t it?

Found a bug? Want to suggest an improvement? Let us know!

You found a bug? You have an idea? You want to get something improved in the product?

There’s a channel for that: We call it “Adobe Tracker.” Adobe Tracker is your place to go, when you find a bug and want to report it to us, so that we can fix it in the next release. You can also file in your feature requests, ideas, requests for improvements. It’s very esy to do and the reports go directly into our systems, and our product managers, engineers and support people have direct access to it.

Before you file in a bug report or idea, you might want to check, if someone else has done it already. You can search through the database here. In case you find something fitting, you can add comments to the existing bug and you can also “vote” for this bug or feature request. And the more people vote for a feature … You get the idea.

You can report a bug here.
You can file in a feature request here.