FW: ForeHelp vs. RoboHelp

["Ramamurthy, Heather" <Heather -dot- Ramamurthy -at- ASPECT -dot- COM>]

I'm forwarding this message for a friend who wishes to remain anonymous.

RoboHelp is the most popular help authoring tool by far (probably 90% of the
market). More help authors have RoboHelp experience than ForeHelp
experience, so RoboHelp is better if learning curve is a major factor.

There is no particular technical reason to prefer one package over the
other. RoboHelp is very large (over 50MB for the whole thing), and it's also
been full of bugs in recent releases. It works directly with Microsoft Word.
All RoboHelp functions are Word macros. When you run RoboHelp you're running
Word along with the Microsoft Help Compiler. Also if you want to create
Microsoft's HTML-based Help, you have to install and run Internet Explorer.

ForeHelp doesn't use a word processor like Word. It uses a database system
to store its help source files. This is convenient, because you don't have
to remember to save your work all the time - it is saved automatically. And
ForeHelp is much deeper in its choice of functions because it doesn't depend
on Word for its capabilities. The problem with ForeHelp is that its
functions are sometimes hard to understand and buried deep beneath tabs and
options in dialog boxes. ForeHelp is not a good tool to use if you have
never developed online help before.

Bottom line? RoboHelp is the industry standard, and ForeHelp is the
specialized tool. RoboHelp is easy for any Word user to understand
initially, but it gets more difficult as you do more difficult tasks with
help development. ForeHelp is generally harder to learn.

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