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Work Efficiently With RoboHelp HTML
By Suzanne Hardy

Author bio

If you develop online help, policies and procedures, a Web site, or other online documentation, you may use or have had exposure to eHelp Corporation's RoboHelp HTML. If you want to learn more about how to work efficiently in this help-authoring tool, this article is for you.

In RoboHelp HTML, you work with a "project" to organize information, build structure and navigation, and add content. This project contains all the files used in the online documentation, such as HTML (topic) files, image and multimedia files, and style sheets.

Experienced online information developers know that managing this information involves more than just writing and creating links (which are skills on their own). Developing a project in an authoring tool such as RoboHelp HTML is information architecture, a skill you use to make information useable, easily available, consistent, and logical. You practice information architecture not only to achieve the ideal output but, also, to work as efficiently as possible in your authoring tool, making the project easy to maintain, lean, and efficient.

You can use RoboHelp HTML to accomplish this goal. Here are a few ideas from the latest version (X3).

• Linking. You already know how to create links, and you know the basic rules, such as don't overwhelm users with too many links on a page, and link to information that directly pertains to the hotspot text. But are you using links as efficiently as possible in your project?
  
  If you have information that is repeated throughout multiple topics, changes can be time consuming to maintain. For example, in a large project I was working on, I noticed that when a set of measurement units changed in the product I was documenting, I had to make the change in many different topics. So I created a single topic that listed the measurement units and then created "popup links" to the topic in all the topics that referred to the measurements.
  
  Creating the "core" topic and the popup links didn't take very long, and it was worth it to consolidate the information. The popup link gives users the information they need in a small window that opens on top of the main topic without making them "leave" the main topic.
  
  
• Conditional text. If you need to deliver several versions of a project, such as a printed manual and an online help system, or a subset of the online help, it's easier to maintain one set of source files than it is to update duplicate information in separate projects. Consider using conditional text to "mark" text that you want to be delivered for each version. (For example, an image to be distributed in the printed manual only could be marked with a tag called "Print"). When you generate the project, you define which tags you want to exclude from the output.
  
  The initial work of planning the strategy and applying conditional build tags is worth it given the time you'll save by not maintaining separate sets of files. Don't be intimidated by this feature—it's not just for advanced users and can save you lots of time.
  
  
• Templates. Do you have certain information that goes into every topic you create, such as a table, text, logo, or other element? In RoboHelp HTML, you can create new topics based on a topic template that has specific text, tables, images, or other characteristics. Using templates saves you time if there's information that needs to be inserted every time you create a new topic.
  
  
• Headers/footers. When you use the headers/footers feature with templates, you can repeat information at the top and/or bottom of multiple topics. For example, before circulating topics for review, you can create and apply a footer that displays the author's name, the date, the module, and other tracking information. Or you can add a logo or a copyright to the top or bottom of topics. When you update the header/footer, all topics associated with it are automatically updated.
  
  
• Style sheets. If you're using RoboHelp HTML, chances are you are using a style sheet. Style sheets allow you to control the formatting of your topics in one location instead of in each topic, ensuring consistency and saving an untold amount of time in formatting.
  
  Some authors also use inline styles, which are applied from the Formatting menu or toolbar. For example, if your dialog names are always boldface, you might select the dialog name and click Bold on the Formatting toolbar or menu (instead of changing and applying a style from a style sheet). However, inline styles can cause problems—they override style sheet formatting. So, if you make a change to your style sheet, any text with inline styles applied is not updated.
  
  To fix this problem, create and apply character styles (which you can apply to words or blocks of text globally), instead. Then, if you decide all the dialog names should not be boldface, you can simply change the character style once in the style sheet instead of searching every topic and manually removing the boldface formatting.
  
  
• See Also cross-references. When clicked, the See Also button displays a list of other topics users may want to see, providing another navigational aid for users. To use this feature in topics, you create a grouping of topics and then add the button to each topic.
  
  See Also references are different from Related Topics references and are easier to maintain. With Related Topics, you manually add topics to each button. Any time you want the list of related topics to change, you must open every button to make the change. If you have a small number of topics with a rather unusual or customized list of related topics, Related Topics references work fine. Otherwise, use See Also references, which update every button when you change anything in the group.

As you can see, there are many ways to make your job as information architect easier. You can find quick and efficient ways to manage your RoboHelp HTML projects that will save you lots of time in the long run.