Farewell RoboHelp? Maybe...

RoboHelp wasn't the first help authoring tool, or HAT. That was Doc-To-Help in 1991. But RoboHelp took the market lead in 1995 and has held it until now. But the HAT market is changing; between this paper's submission date and the conference, things will have changed again. Therefore, this paper summarizes the state of the HAT market as of June 2006. The conference presentation will offer up-to-date analysis. The HAT world applauded when Macromedia bought eHelp; the increased resources that Macromedia brought would support further extensions of RoboHelp. But the enthusiasm soured when it became clear that Macromedia had little interest in RoboHelp. RoboHelp drifted and stagnated. Its low point was when an unstaffed booth at the 2005 Writers UA conference sent conference goers swarming to the Madcap Software booth to see Flare