RE: Anyone had problems with the Help in Doc-To-Help?

[John Hedtke <john -at- hedtke -dot- com>]

At 10:43 AM 11/2/2007, Dan Goldstein wrote:
>Yeah, the shoemaker's children go barefoot. I first learned RoboHelp in
>1997 (still a Blue Sky product at the time), and I remember thinking
>that the online Help was pretty bad.

I had had Doc-to-Help for my department in 1993 and then, on the 
urging of one of my writers, I bought RoboHelp (probably about 
v3.0).  The documentation was so UNBELIEVABLY bad that I returned the 
product and got my money back immediately.  (The sales guy said 
"Well, just load it and try it."  I said "I'm sure it does everything 
you say it does, but sooner or later I'm going to have to look at the 
documentation and that's going to piss me off so mightily that I'll 
want to come looking for someone, so give me my $500 back and we'll 
call it square.")  I didn't buy the product for any of my departments 
until several years later; a couple years after that, I did my first 
book on RoboHelp and lo!  there were many things I ended up writing 
about that >NO-ONE< at Blue Sky/eHelp knew about anymore.  :)

MadCap Flare is looking pretty good these days, although I haven't 
poked at it enough to give a fully validated opinion.  And I'm about 
to get RH 7 from Adobe as part of the Tech Comm Suite and I'll have a 
chance to see if the docs are better than RH X5 or if it's the 
typical Adobe documentation we've all come to know and... know.

>Irony can be tasty, but it isn't very nutritious. Since you're a trial
>user and a potential customer, maybe you should forward your post
>verbatim to D2H support, and see if they step up to the plate.

Darned good idea and I second this.  My casual experience with the 
folks there has been that they're pretty decent people; see what they 
might have to say about this.



Yours truly,

John Hedtke
Author/Consultant/Contract Writer
www.hedtke.com <-- website
541-685-5000 (office landline)
541-554-2189 (cell)
john -at- hedtke -dot- com (primary email)
johnhedtke -at- aol -dot- com (secondary email) 

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