How Suite It Is: Adobe Showcases Its New Technical Communication Suite

by Patrick Lufkin

Patrick is a longtime member of STC. He is currently Membership Manager of the Management SIG and Chair of the Kenneth M. Gordon Memorial Scholarship.

For years Adobe Systems has been fending off persistent rumors that FrameMaker and/or RoboHelp were going to be killed off or abandoned. With its newly released Technical Communication Suite, Adobe will surely put those rumors to rest.

In early November 2007, Adobe showed off the new suite to a group of San Francisco Bay Area technical communicators. In a seminar given at Adobe's San Francisco offices, R. J. Jacquez, the suite's product evangelist, demonstrated that the suite can do just about anything that technical communicators-be they authors of print documents, producers of web based help, or designers of online training-might ask of it.

The suite consists of FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp 7, Captivate 3, and Acrobat 3D Version 8. The suite also includes some handy ancillary tools such as RoboScreen Capture, and RoboSource Control, each features of RoboHelp. All of the programs feature major improvements and have been tightly integrated to work together.

Adobe characterizes the suite as a "complete solution for authoring, managing, and publishing technical information and instructional content in multiple languages and formats," and says the suite will allow users to "create and maintain technical documentation, user assistance systems, knowledge bases, simulations, software demonstrations, and other support and training information."

While Adobe has long worked to position FrameMaker as a single sourcing tool, getting to the desired results has not always been easy, even with the help of third-party tools such as Webworks Publisher. With FrameMaker 8, Adobe appears to have moved the program much closer to being a true single-sourcing tool.

While FrameMaker continues its unrivaled support for long print documents, it also includes enhanced functionality for versioning and single-sourcing. Support for outputting to different formats has been improved to lessen or eliminate the need for third-party add-ons. (WebWorks Publisher no longer ships with the program.) The production of channel-specific versions of documents through the use of output filters using Boolean expressions and the use of attributes to control conditional output has been enhanced.

As with earlier versions, authors can choose to work in either a style-tagging mode or in a fully structured environment. FrameMaker 8 has now been optimized for better support of XML and now supports DITA's topic-based authoring. Adobe says the new version has moved away from reliance on proprietary formats, and now conforms to industry standards such as DITA and DocBook.

FrameMaker 8 can also serve as the primary authoring tool for other parts of the suite, especially RoboHelp, and can, in turn, use files produced in Captivate and Acrobat 3D.

RoboHelp

RoboHelp, long the tool of choice for creating online help, has also received a number of enhancements, including Unicode support which allows authoring in multiple languages. One can import content from many formats, including Adobe PDF, FrameMaker, HTML, XML, or Word, as well as from such multimedia formats as SWF, AVI and MP3. It can generate output to almost any online format one might care to use.

If one chooses to author in FrameMaker, Robohelp can link to the FrameMaker files and easily update its RoboHelp topics when the source files are updated.

Captivate

The other primary authoring tool in the suite is Captivate, a tool for creating software demonstrations, simulations, and scenario-based training. During a screen-recording session, the program can capture mouse movements and other activity to quickly create interactive simulations. One can add text descriptions, multimedia, various forms of interactivity, and even assessments with scored user interaction.

Acrobat 3D

While all of the suite members look strong, the wow factor award probably goes to Acrobat 3D, which has the ability to work with 3D objects such as those produced by Solid Modeler and other 3D CAD software. As Jacquez pointed out during the demonstration, engineers are often loath to hand their 3D model files to technical communicators, for fear they will get messed up. Acrobat 3D obviates the problem by allowing communicators to import 2D and 3D designs in PDF and then manipulate the PDFs without danger to the original files.

One can add materials (skins), create exploded views, edit lighting, and even add embedded audio and video. One can save the results as 3D objects-which can be rotated and manipulated by the viewer-or as 2D images. While creating 3D PDFs requires Acrobat 3D, the resulting PDFs can be used inside of FrameMaker and RoboHelp and can be read by anyone using a regular PDF reader.

Pricing

Adobe has priced the suite at $1500 for those who do not own earlier versions of any of the constituent products. However, current owners of any version of FrameMaker or RoboHelp can upgrade for $999. The educational price for students is $599.

For a free trial download, go to:

http://www.adobe.com/products/technicalcommunicationsuite/