Framemaker and RoboHelp

[Jim Barrow]

Will the chaos and madness never cease?

Okay, here's my latest workplace drama.  Our Tech Pubs group has gotten the okay to purchase the Adobe Technical Suite (Frame and Robo) to create end user manuals and online help.  That is until a business analyst spent the entire day looking at Adobe presentations.  In short, he wants the tech writers to create the help file in Frame AND RoboHelp because he believes that Frame is used for printed material and RoboHelp is used for online help. 

The following are excerpts that give you an idea of where he is coming from:

"Robohelp and Framemaker should play nice together. I’m currently watching an Adobe online presentation which focuses on Framemaker and Robohelp titled “Benefits of Content Reuse”; it says that in the TCS you can link Robohelp to a Framemaker book, then when you save the book Robohelp can pick up all of the updates. Unless you’ve already started authoring in Robohelp, there would be no duplication of effort; Framemaker will directly produce print-oriented materials, and Robohelp will pick up the Framemaker content and compile it for online help.  Adobe offers these products together for a reason. The workflow for this suite works best as follows in order to have an attractively laid-out printed manual and matching online help: create the manual in a Framemaker book, link to the Framemaker book in Robohelp, and whenever the Framemaker materials are updated, simply ask Robohelp to update the linked content."

What?  Last I heard you could create pretty good looking stuff in RoboHelp.  Am I correct in saying that we should only use RoboHelp and that this app can produce a good looking printed manual?

Thanks,

Jim