
	The Willamette Galley A Bi-Monthly Newsletter Volume 4, Issue 3, July 2001

RoboHelp vs. ForeHelp

Summary by Christie Christopherson

Note: This summary provides information that addresses several key issues about choosing and using RoboHelp and ForeHelp. If you have additional points to add, please send them to debray@raycomm.com.

This summary lists strengths and weaknesses of two Help Authoring Tools (HATs): RoboHelp and ForeHelp. In general, ForeHelp has a strong user base that appreciates its ease of use, independence from Microsoft Word, rich feature set, and great technical support. Most techwhirlers that wrote about this topic preferred ForeHelp because of those reasons.

RoboHelp Strengths

RoboHelp is the industry leader.
Easier to find Help authors with RoboHelp experience than authors with ForeHelp experience.
Works directly with Microsoft Word.
Easy for Word users to learn and understand.
RoboHelp 7 is stable.

RoboHelp Weaknesses

Dependent on Microsoft Word, which means that you must not only update RoboHelp when there are new features, but also potentially whenever Word has changes.
More difficult learning curve than ForeHelp.
Documentation can be intimidating, and information is hard to find.
Can be expensive to own because of frequent major upgrades.
No support for older versions.
Poor technical support experienced by most techwhirlers (however, some techwhirlers have experienced good technical support from Blue Sky [now eHelp]).
Versions of RoboHelp prior to 7 are buggy.

ForeHelp Strengths

Not dependent on Microsoft Word.
Learning curve is good, easy, and almost nonexistent.
Good documentation to get you through your learning stages.
Great technical support.
Uses a database system to store its Help source files, which provides you with the ability to easily structure and restructure your Help system.
Rich feature set compared to RoboHelp.
Supports JavaHelp.

ForeHelp Weaknesses

Functions are buried in the menus (however, there is an icon available on the toolbar for almost every menu item, so you can customize the toolbar to reflect the functions you use the most).

Related URLs

Visit the following URLs to obtain demo versions of each HAT.

RoboHelp: http://www.ehelp.com
ForeHelp: http://www.ff.com

Thanks to the following techwhirlers who contributed to this topic (click on a name to jump to the original posting):

Heather Ramamurthy
Jill Burgchardt
Chris Hamilton
Mike Hiatt
Cheryl Dwyer
John Garison
Sean Brierley
Tracey Moore
Geoff Hart
David Knopf

This summary was originally published on The Official TECHWR-L Web site, http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/. Reprinted with permission.