What 's New in Adobe RoboHelp (September 2022 release)

What's new and changed in Adobe RoboHelp

Grammar and spell check

• Eliminate any grammatical error with the out-of-the-box grammar checkers (Sapling and Bing) or with any other author assistant tool of your choice. For more information, see:
  • Check grammar and spelling
  • Configure grammar and spell checker profile

PDF templates

• Publish well-designed PDFs with consistent layouts from RoboHelp. Users can create templates to set the layout and styling for content and apply various settings to fine-tune the PDF. Get out-of-the-box sample templates for PDF publishing, which can be customized in the WYSIWYG template editor. For more information, see:
  • PDF templates
  • Design a page layout
  • Publish PDF output
  • Work with the common content styles
    
  • Components of a PDF template
    

Other PDF enhancements

MathML support

When enabled, you'll be able to render any MathML equation in your content to a PDF output. In the Advanced tab of the PDF preset, you can find the option to enable or disable MathML support.

PDF Conformance support

In this release, we’ve added support for PDF conformance. PDF conformance ensures that a PDF complies to a set of standards, such as, accessibility, colors, images, encryption, forms, and so on. For example, you can choose any standard, PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u, PDF/A-3a, PDF/A-3b, PDF/A-3u, and so on. 

The drop-down list to choose conformance is in the Advanced tab of the PDF preset.

PDF Security Settings

The PDF preset contains a new tab, Security. Using the options in the tab, you can set security-related restrictions on the PDF document.

The following options are present in the Security tab:

Set password to open the document: When enabled, you can set a password so that any user that opens the PDF will be prompted to enter the password that you've set.

Set the document restrictions: When enabled, you'll be able to set the following options:

• Owner password: An owner password allows certain operations and restrictions that are applied to the PDF document. The following operations are present: 
  
  • Printing: When enabled, a user can print the PDF.
    
  • Draft quality printing: Enable this checkbox if you want to preserve printer ink while printing.
    
  • Content copying: Enable this checkbox if you want a user to copy a block of content from the resultant PDF.
    
  • Annotations: Enable this checkbox if you want a user to annotate text in the PDF. 
    
  • Content modifications: If you want the user to edit any content on the PDF, enable this checkbox.
    
  • Content copying for accessibility: Allows screen reader software to utilize the text within the PDF file for reading the PDF file.
  • Document assembly: When enabled, a user can use the document and add or insert pages (or other documents) to the document.

PDF Compression

In the Advanced tab of the PDF preset, we’ve added compression support for PDF. The option Use full compression to optimize the PDF size is introduced. When enabled, you’ll be able to generate a PDF file with full compression, which will reduce the size of the PDF significantly. 

Format TOC leader

In this release, you can specify the TOC leader with a dotted, solid, space or any other character.

Page count

You can now skip certain pages from the Page Count option. This is useful in scenarios such as if you want the numbering to start after the cover and TOC pages.

PDF Print options

You can include the following Printer marks:

• Crop Marks
• Bleed Marks
• Registration Marks
• Color Bars
• Page Information

You can also specify the bleed box size and set the color space to CMYK or RGB.

ICC Profile

Specify an ICC Profile when you want to create certain PDF/A and PDF/X conformance modes along with CMYK color space. It can be provided as a local file, a web URL, or a standard name.

Multi-level TOC

In this release, you can create a TOC in the PDF output according to the hierarchy in the project TOC. The TOC can have any specified level.

Chapter TOC

In a PDF or printed documentation, it's common to have a chapter-specific mini TOC at the start of the chapter. You now have an option to insert the chapter TOC in the page layout editor and apply styles to font, leader, and so on. In addition, you can also sequence a TOC, for example, title, chapter TOC, and then the chapter content.

Table continuation marker

Large tables generally get distributed across pages in the PDF. To ensure that a table flows seamlessly between the end of a page and the beginning of the next page, you can enable the continuation of all tables in a PDF.

Changes to Index

On the Index page, by default, the terms are grouped by the first letter of their words. You can use the CSS, idx-keyword-group{}, to style the group.

WORD TEMPLATE

Like a PDF template, you can also create and customize a Word template. You can create custom Word templates with specific page layouts and define formatting for page layout components (like TOC, index, glossary) or components (like heading, paragraph, list) using stylesheets.

For more information, see Generate Word output.

Word template in the output preset

In this release, you can generate a Word output using a template.

To start using a template, you must first select a template. In the Layout tab of the Word preset, select the template from the dropdown list.

Then, to customize the template, in the Templates panel, select Edit from the context menu.

For more information, see Generate Word output.

Other enhancements in this release

Positioned DIV

Adobe RoboHelp (2022 release) added a Positioned DIV, using which a user can specify the positioning method for an element. To insert a Position DIV in a topic, select Insert HTML Element > Positioned Div. In the container that appears in the topic, the X and Y positions are absolute. You can adjust the width and height of the container. In addition, you can adjust the margins of the container. You can change the position of the container by changing the left, right, top, and bottom values in the LAYOUT section of the Content Properties panel.

z-index

The z-index property specifies the stack order of an element. The z-index CSS property sets the z-order of a positioned div element and its descendants.

z-index only works on positioned elements (position: absolute, position: relative, position: fixed, or position: sticky).

Specify the z-index in the Layout section of the Content Properties panel.

Clear Inline Formatting

After you've applied formatting to a block of text and then applied inline formatting to a part of the text, you can clear the inline formatting that you've applied.

Select the block of text and in the Content Properties panel, select Text Formatting > Clear Inline Formatting.

Redesign of Template Panel

In this release of Adobe RoboHelp, the Skins panel has been renamed to the Templates panel.

The Templates panel is a one-stop panel to manage all the output templates.

You can now add a PDF and Word template and import the same.

When you select Done, the new template gets created. A new folder gets created for the template.

User-specific review data

In this release, we’ve removed user-specific review data from the project file. The Review ID is only stored in Creative Cloud. 

The information about the Review ID is found in the upgrade logs.

Changes to the Snippets panel

In previous versions of RoboHelp, you were not able to see the description of a snippet in the list of snippets. In this release, you can view the description by hovering on the I icon on a snippet.

Project Settings 

After upgrading a project to RoboHelp (2022 release), in the settings folder, you can find the JSON files for tag groups, colors, fields, status, and so on.

Dynamic Content Filtering expressions

In this release of RoboHelp, you will see Condition Expressions in Dynamic Content Filtering section. An expression is a set of instructions. Expressions specify topics or content to include or exclude from the output. You can define a basic expression that excludes tags, or a complex expression with Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, NOT.

For more information, see Condition expressions. 

Rotation and scaling

For any content, such as an image, table, or positioned div object, you can now rotate the object on its axis, scale the object, and change the origin of the transformation in terms of X and Y offset. By default, the origin of transformation is the center of the element.

Scaling is a transformation technique that resizes the image on a two-dimensional plane. Both the horizontal and vertical dimensions are resized at different scales.

There are newe CSS properties for rotate and scale. For example,

White spaces

The CSS property whitespace controls how white spaces are handled and how the text wrapping happens on the line boundary in any paragraph. In RoboHelp, the following options are supported:

• normal
• pre
• nowrap
• pre-wrap
• pre-line
• break-spaces

To access these options, select your template > Stylesheets > Content > White-space.

For more information on the properties, see the MDN help docs.

Transparency

In the Layout section of the property panel, there is a new property Transparency, which you can use to set the transparency of any content or element. You can set the transparency between 0 and 1 or 0% and 100%. The CSS also provides this support as opacity.

Master page

Master pages used in the PDF or Word output template have been renamed as Page Layout.

Master pages used for topic templates or for online outputs have been renamed as Topic Layouts.

For more information, see Templates in Adobe RoboHelp.

Import Settings dialog has a new home

In this release, you can launch the Import Settings dialog from the File menu.

Select File > Import Settings > From 2019/From 2020 and the Import Settings dialog launches.

Fixed Issues in this release

For the list of issues fixed in this release, see Fixed issues.

System requirements

System requirements