Dreamweaver and RoboHelp?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Martha Rogers wonders: <<I was used to working HAT-less with the RTFs and
help compiler (uphill, in the snow). I liked understanding the mechanics of
what I was creating.>>

It's helpful to understand the mechanics of what you're doing because it
lets you dive in and fix things when (as so often happens) something goes
wrong. The big advantage of a tool like RoboHelp comes down to the fact that
it's considerably faster and more efficient than hand-coding because it
handles a lot of the annoying details for you. (The same could be said of
all modern Web authoring tools.) Why create the RTF footnotes manually and
try to remember how to stock them with appropriate information when you can
do this all at the press of a button in RH? I use RH to produce WinHelp, and
think that on the whole, it's a wonderful tool.

<<My instincts tell me if I use RH for WebHelp, I may never grasp what the
tool is doing and why.>>

That's possible, but probably irrelevant. More serious is the allegation
that RH produces bloated, non-standards-compliant HTML. Can't speak to that,
since I've yet to see a HTML-based help system good enough to persuade me to
abandon WinHelp and thus I haven't made the comparison. Maybe it's just that
people haven't yet learned best practices, but I find most HTMLHelp systems
painful and unusable.

<<The HTML help must be 508-compliant and compatible with IE and Netscape
but Active X controls are verboten.>>

Sounds like a strong starting point for your design. But if your goal is
HTML, and your other option is Dreamweaver, that's a really good tool to
begin with. DW produces some of the cleanest and most compliant code around,
and offers a lot of productivity tools that make it easy to produce decent
Web pages--including help systems. What it doesn't do (out of the box) is
generate context-sensitive help IDs that let you link the HTML to the
software it documents. This isn't an impossible barrier, but you'll need to
talk to your programmers to find out how they can link to your help files.

<<An eHelp Web site survey shows that almost 11 percent of respondents
edited their topics in RoboHelp using DW. I don't understand that statistic.
Why are they using RH if they've got DW?>>

Very interesting statistic. Given that you'd expect eHelp to do what
everyone else does--slant the survey subtly to make their product look as
good as possible--the actual percentage is probably significantly higher.
This seems to support the notion that RH doesn't produce the finest HTML,
but it may also be that those 10%+ of RH users are people like you, who like
opening the hood and tinkering. Getting back to one of your previous points,
this statistic also suggests that you can keep working the way you prefer:
use RH for its obvious productivity benefits, but edit in an HTML editor so
you can see what's going on under the hood and make necessary adjustments.

<<Is it not possible to generate an index in Dreamweaver?>>

I'm a bit behind the version curve on DW, so I can't say whether current
versions support indexing. I suspect (based on no strong evidence) that they
don't, largely because I haven't seen any broadly accepted indexing standard
for Web pages. This is a shameful lack, frankly. Search engines can only
improve from their current pitiful state, but only an indexer can create a
truly context-sensitive (i.e., useful) index. Software can't yet do this
automatically, and probably won't be able to do so for another decade or
more. Make that "several decades" if nobody creates a W3C standard for
indexing, thereby driving the software developers to add indexing to their
toolbox.

Deva Tools and HTML Indexer (http://www.html-indexer.com/) are both strong
options for indexing, and combined with DW, make a compelling alternative to
RH for HTML-based help solutions. You said that neither is an option at your
employer, but perhaps you simply need to make a stronger case? Deva Tools is
more than just an indexing solution, so it makes a particularly good
alternative to RH; HTML Indexer has been around longer and continues to get
good reviews _from indexers_. The economics of DW plus either indexing tool
compared with the high cost of RH make for a strong argument against RH
imho. But you won't go terribly wrong with RH either. It's not the industry
standard solely by chance and aggressive marketing.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_