Five RoboHelp tips / Indus

Five RoboHelp tips

– Nandini Gupta and Samartha Vashishtha

In this second article in the technical communication tools series, we bring you five RoboHelp tips that will help you optimize your Help projects and generate better output.

Track the status of each topic from within RoboHelp

The Status tab of topic properties provides a comprehensive To Do list and several other options to track each topic from start to finish.

Any time you need to review the status of the project as a whole, you can generate a Topic Properties report.

Adjust Word macro settings for printed documentation

Sometimes, you may want to generate printed documentation from your RoboHelp project. Even if your final output format is AIR Help, WebHelp, or CHM, you may want to create interim printed documentation so that reviewers can easily comment on it.

RoboHelp uses macros to generate printed documentation through the Microsoft Word application installed on your computer. Therefore, before you generate printed documentation in RoboHelp, ensure that the macro security settings in Word are set to allow RoboHelp macros to run. In MS Word 2003, follow these steps to modify the settings:

Click Tools > Macro > Security.
Select Medium level of security and click OK.
Generate printed documentation output from RoboHTML. When prompted, choose to allow the RoboHelp macros to execute.

Unlike MS Word 2003, Word 2007 does not classify macro security settings as Very High, High, Medium, and Low. You must, therefore, allow all macros to run before you generate printed documentation. See this blog post to understand how. Once you have generated the output, you may revert to a higher security setting.

Create master TOCs with TOC placeholders

Let’s say your RoboHelp project is the single source for the policies to license a product in various countries. If you need to generate output regionwise or for any set of countries, you don’t need to create TOCs from scratch. Instead, create master TOCs from existing TOCs by using TOC placeholders. RoboHelp substitutes a TOC placeholder with actual contents in the output.

For more information about TOCs, see this Help article.

Format variables in UDV Design Editor

User-defined variables or UDVs help you create variables with specific values and use them any number of times in a RoboHelp project.

RoboHelp supports formatted UDVs. This means that you can add images, links, and even multimedia files in a variable value. You can apply text formatting and even spell-check the value. What’s more – you can also add conditional build tags so that the variable value appears different for different outputs.

Examples of formatted variables:

Product name and logo
Logo with a link to the copyright page
Logo with different images for print and online output

See this article for more information about UDVs.

Keep a self-signed and reusable certificate ready for testing AIR Help

All Adobe AIR applications need to be signed with a digital certificate and can’t be delivered without one. While your organization purchases one from a certificate authority, you can continue testing the AIR Help you created in RoboHelp with a certificate generated from within RoboHelp.

To create a certificate for internal use, follow these steps:

In the Single Source Layouts pod, right-click the Adobe AIR layout and select Properties.
On the Settings page of the Adobe AIR dialog box, click the Create button.

In the Create Self-Signed Digital Certificate dialog box, enter the following details:

Publisher Name: Specify the name of the publisher (of the Help). Usually, it is the name of your company. If you are creating a Help application for another company, specify the name of your client.
Country: Select the country of the publisher.
Type: Select the encryption standard for the digital certificate. The 2048-RSA standard provides stronger encryption than the 1024-RSA standard.
Save As: Click Browse to select a folder and save the digital certificate that you created. Self-signed digital certificates are saved with a .p12 extension.

If you are just beginning to learn RoboHelp or want to know more about specific features, the RoboHelp online Help is an indispensable resource. You can also contribute to the documentation by adding tips and tricks, tutorials, troubleshooting information, or suggestions for improvement; all you need is a free Adobe.com account. Read these guidelines and start contributing right away!

About the author:
The authors work on the learning resources team at Adobe Systems. You can follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nandinizg and http://twitter.com/samarthav.

About the illustration:
The image is used with permission from Mallika Yelandur.

All product names, logos, and any trademarks used in the illustrations and elsewhere in this article are for identification purpose only, are the property of their owners, and their rights are acknowledged.