atw: Re: RoboHelp conditional builds

Hi Howard,
I had some problems with RHv5 a couple of contracts ago, and managed by shear luck to catch the ear of an RH development team member. His initial response was to upgrade, as according to him, V5 is pretty buggy.
That was not an option, since I was the only person on site who knew how to use RH and I was only there long enough for a do-or-die, pull our act out of the fire, eleventh hour rush to create user & admin manuals as well as on-line help for a shiny new fraud detection software.
In a nut shell, RHv5 simply does not do some of its advertised functions, much less anything more demanding. Creative work-arounds are an option, but you hardly would expect to act as an unpaid extension to the RH development team for a piece of software that is not exactly in the low rent district.
That said, the RH development team member assured me that the later versions were regular whiz-bang dynamos; but there is also something to be said for: Once Burned; Twice Shy. And I am still seeing posts on various lists from folks who use RHv7 and can't get it to co-operate with the basics. I've had my fill of companies who follow the Microsoft technique of using the clients as beta testers for buggy software. The general consensus on the various lists appears to be that both Quadralay's Flare (developed by former RoboHelp developers) and WebWork ePublisher run circles around RH. However, in most contracts, choice is not an option and you work with what you've got.
I too remember and miss the far more user friendly - hard copy user manuals that used to come with software. What little on-line help is to be found now is not much help and appears to be written by the developers ? who have neither the time, nor the inclination and very often, lack the skills as well (and why should they be expected to have a skill for a completely different job). But what can you do when the powers-that-be reckon that anyone with a number two lead pencil can write, and fluency in English is not a requirement? I hope the current lackadaisical attitude is more of a problem on this side of the pond, where high prices, low quality and cheap labor have become the standard. But then, like the Tarot Fool teetering on the edge of a cliff , we are told we not in a recession diving headlong into a full-out depression either. And did I mention I have the deed for the San Francisco bridge and will sell? 
Stepping down from the soap-box now.
I will see if I still have the RH team member's addy on file and send it to you off list. He was very nice and was doing his best to help (as well as sell upgrades), but then you can't make a silk purse out of a hog's ear. Meanwhile, you might try these:
Yahoo HATT (Help Authoring Tools and Techniques) forum (<http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/HATT/>http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/HATT/)
Peter Grainge's site for all thing RoboHelp: <http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/importing/importing_word_docs.htm>http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/importing/importing_word_docs.htm. 

Cheers,
MNMary


On 2/27/2008 11:09:13 PM, austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> A question for people who have experience using conditional builds with
> RoboHelp.
>
> I wanted to produce two CHM versions of an admin document containing
> procedures, for two different audiences. One audience (staff at DFAT
> posts) has only limited access to the functionality, so their procedures
> form a subset of the set of procedures for the other audience (our Voice
> Operations Unit). I therefore created conditional build tags (POSTS and
> VOU)  to apply to the topics and, as hoped, managed to produce two
> different CHM documents, each displaying only the procedures for the
> relevant audience.
>
> The only snag is that in the table of contents I grouped topics into books > and I had hoped that, where a build involved none of the topics in a book, 
> that book would itself not appear in the TOC. But that
> isn't so. The book did appear but it seems to have been converted to a topic, and its contents are, most strangely, the text from a quite different topic. 
>
> Is there any way to prevent a book from appearing in the TOC for a build when it consists of topics excluded from that build

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