First Impressions of Adobe RoboHelp 2019

Adobe just released a new ver­sion of FrameMak­er and Robo­Help last month.  If you have used the appli­ca­tion for years, you might be for­giv­en for not even rec­og­niz­ing RoboHelp—it’s been com­plete­ly revamped.

First, for such an old pro­gram (more than 25 years!), Adobe has per­formed an “extreme makeover” when it comes to the user inter­face. It’s clean and mod­ern. It looks like a new application.

Adobe has bestowed Robo­Help with a min­i­mal­ist user inter­face. There are not dozens of icons to click like you see in an appli­ca­tion like Microsoft Word. Even though it looks dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than old­er ver­sions of the pro­gram, I found myself being able to use it right away. How­ev­er, Adobe prob­a­bly rec­og­nized that not every­one wants to learn a new user inter­face so the com­pa­ny is also includ­ing Robo­Help Clas­sic 2019 for those users who pre­fer to work in famil­iar ways.

A Quick Way to Generate Output Files

I like the new way in which you can out­put files.

When you click the Quick Gen­er­ate icon, you can click the out­put you want to gen­er­ate. I like that you can cre­ate out­put files with­out a lot of con­fig­u­ra­tion. I also appre­ci­ate that you can keep work­ing while Robo­Help cre­ates the files in the back­ground. If you want to tweak set­tings for an out­put file, there’s still the Edit button.

Adobe Further Improves RoboHelp’s Search

Robo­Help 2019 builds on some of the improve­ments intro­duced in Robo­Help 2017. Most notably, Robo­Help 2017 includ­ed some wel­come improve­ments by dis­play­ing key­words as users type in the search field. For exam­ple, when I start typ­ing a search query about “con­tact­ing,” Robo­Help starts pro­vid­ing sug­ges­tions on the fly, sim­i­lar to Google’s search engine.

Robo­Help 2019 includes pre­dic­tive search but will also fix users’ typos.  For exam­ple, if I type “HTML5 out­pt,” the HTML5 Help auto­mat­i­cal­ly presents the cor­rect­ed results for me. Giv­en that many users may inad­ver­tent­ly add typos in their search queries, this is a wel­come addition.

RoboHelp 2019 Supports Git, HTML5, and Scalable Vector Graphics

Robo­Help also includes sup­port for Share­Point Online and Git, HTML5, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets (CSS) 3, and Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics (SVG) images. Share­Point and Share­Point Online are not the same thing. With Share­Point Online, you can access inter­nal sites, doc­u­ments, and oth­er infor­ma­tion from anywhere—at the office, at home, or from a mobile device. Git is a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem for track­ing changes in com­put­er files and coor­di­nat­ing work on those files among mul­ti­ple people.

Over­all, I am impressed with the Adobe’s com­mit­ment to over­haul RoboHelp!