RoboHelp 2019 – Update 6 (April 2019)
This blog post was co-authored with Amitoj Singh, Product Manager for Adobe Technical Communication tools at Adobe.
A couple of weeks ago we have rolled out Update 5 for RoboHelp 2019. Today we have released Update 6! Let us go through the what’s new and better in RoboHelp 2019 with Update 6 in this blog post. But before we go into it, here is a list of our blogs posts for all Updates we have rolled out since the first release of RoboHelp 2019 in August 2018.
- RoboHelp 2019 – Update 1
- RoboHelp 2019 – Update 2
- RoboHelp 2019 – Update 3
- RoboHelp 2019 – Update 4
- RoboHelp 2019 – Update 5
As always, the detailed release notes for all updates are available here.
In this post:
- What’s new and better
- Other enhancements
- Bug fixes
- How to get the update
- Report a bug, file in a feature request
What’s new and better
Let’s go through the list of enhancements and bug fixes, that are part of Update 6. Detailed release notes for this and other previous updates are available here.
New: Multi-column support
Sometimes you might need a multi-column layout. Maybe even just for a certain section of your topic. Let’s take this as an example:
Of course, you could start building a “hidden” table for this. But this has a lot of drawbacks and needs much more manual work if you want to “balance” columns (you would need to copy & paste content around between the cells). Thanks to the CSS3 support in RoboHelp 2019, you can now create real columns and let the content flow through the columns automatically. We have added multi-column support in Update 6. In the Visual CSS Editor of RoboHelp 2019, you can now define multi-column layouts in detail on all elements that support columns, like h1–6, p, div, article, and section. Simply open the Visual CSS editor and define the column count, column gap, and column width. And for the Column rules between the columns, you can define the style (like solid, dashed, dotted, etc.), the column rule color and of course the width.
New: Rounded numbers for lists
Step lists with rounded numbers are en vogue these days. You can find them on a lot of place on the web, including our own RoboHelp 2019 Online Help. With RoboHelp 2019, Update 6, it’s easy to create them. We have added a rounded list numbering style. Just select the rounded list style from the Multilevel List Styles in the top toolbar. No deep CSS development necessary. It’s as easy as one click. Yep – that simple.
New: Restart list numbering manually
Sometimes you need to continue the numbering from a previous list in a new list. Sounds easy? One might think so. But in the HTML and CSS world, this can be a little bit more complicated to achieve. We have made this easy.
New: Define spacing between prefix and content
And when we are at lists: We have also added a new feature that makes it easy for you to increase or decrease the space between the prefix and the content. There are two new buttons for this in the Properties of a style. You can easily define the spacing in the Visual CSS Designer:
Enhanced: Publish to PDF
With Update 6 for RoboHelp 2019, we implemented many enhancements and bug fixes for PDF publishing.
One of the major ones is that the PDF Bookmarks are now generated from your project’s Table of Contents.
Also, we have added a new option in PDF Output Settings: “Include All Referenced Topics.” Just activated it to include topics in the PDF which are not part of the Table of Contents (TOC) but referenced in one of the topics.
To make PDF Publishing easier, we have added a new master page for PDF and a new pdf.css, which are now part of every new project created with RoboHelp 2019 Update 6.
And we have also added the possibility to add specific styling for your Table of Contents and other elements for a published PDF like the Glossary Title and much more. Publishing highly polished PDFs from RoboHelp becomes more easy and fun than ever before.
In addition to that, we have also added a new field for the total number of pages. Now you an also add the total number of pages as a field into your page header or footer. Adding headers/footers that read “Page 1 of 9,999” suddenly have become a no-brainer.
Enhanced: More customizations and fixes for Output Skins
We have made multiple enhancements and fixes for output skins in Update 6. First and foremost, all the out-of-the-box skins are now Section 508 compliant (Azure Blue, Charcoal Grey, Indigo and others).
In case there are any skin customizations, those would need to be made 508 compliant by the author.
Another request from many customers has been to change the title logo size and title font. We have added this functionality in Update 6:
For those of you who are publishing to the Indigo layout, we have added custom buttons (such as Expand/Collapse All expanding texts):
And when we are at Skins: In Update 6 we have now made the “Coffee” skin part of the Responsive HTML5 Skins Template Gallery:
Apart from these enhancements, we have made many smaller bug fixes related to skins in Update 6.
Other Enhancements and fixes
Apart from List, Skin, and PDF related enhancement and fixes, there are many other improvements with Update 6. Some of them are mentioned below.
- Lock a file or unlock a file when working with Team Foundation Server as a source control.
- When working with source control, improvements in messaging and user experience when connecting, check-in, checkout, etc.
- In case of an application error, save your work and restart RoboHelp with a new option in the menu.
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- Option in quick generate menu to select all or multiple presets in one go. Here is a snapshot of the same.
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- In the Contents panel, we have added two new context menu options: Expand and Collapse All. Expand will recursively open all subfolders and give you easy access to all files in all subfolders. Collapse all will recursively close all subfolders:
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- In Update 6 we have also improved the New Master Page dialog:
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Bug Fixes
Update 6 for RoboHelp 2019 comes with 34 bug fixes. Here you go with a few of them:
- You can now click on a bookmark of a topic in the Contents Panel. This will open the topic (if not already open) and jump to the bookmark location within that topic. This makes navigating through long topics easier.
- Fixes around search results with Arabic output.
- Auto-size pop-up fixes: The width of auto-size pop-up was not calculated based on the content of the popup.
- Many fixes for CHM output.
- Several fixes regarding focus and delete for lists.
- Image title not updating in French and German locale.
You can find the full list of all 34 bug fixes in Update 6 for Adobe RoboHelp 2019 here.
How to get Update 6 of RoboHelp 2019 release
The best way to update Adobe RoboHelp 2019 is to click on Help → Updates to download and install the latest patch. You can also download the installer directly from the RoboHelp Service Releases page.
Found a bug? Want to suggest an improvement? Let us know!
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 update/release. You can also file in your feature requests, ideas, requests for improvements. It’s very easy to do, and the reports go directly into our system, and our product managers, engineers, and support people have direct access to it.
You can report a bug here.