RoboHelp 9 - The Workspace (nee Environment)

RoboHelp 7 gave us the ability to design what was named as the Environment. In RoboHelp 9 this is referred to as the Workspace and it is now selected top right near the standard Windows icons.

Choosing and closing topics

When Adobe added the ability in RoboHelp 8 to close topics by clicking X on the tab, they also took away X to the right of the tabs. The latter was very useful when you wanted to close a series of tabs and it has been restored in RoboHelp 9.

There is now a dropdown to select an open topic, useful when you have many topics open. Note the asterisk indicating topics with unsaved changes.

For some reason best known to Adobe, when the tabs cannot all be displayed and the left / right arrows are displayed, the dropdown image changes.

Close All But This has been added to the context menu when you right click the tabs.

Designing your workspace

Designing your workspace has been made easier. When you start moving pods around, you will see arrows like those shown below. Move the mouse above an arrow and a screen area will be highlighted, if you release the mouse while that area is highlighted, that is where the pod will be placed.

This is my standard workspace.

• The Design Editor is on the right and has the Topic List added. The Output View also appears here when it is used.
• To the left of the Design Editor are three key pods, Project Manager, Project Setup and Single Source Layouts that I have amalgamated into one pod.
• On the extreme left are flyouts for the pods I use regularly but less frequently.

If you like it, see Item 8 in Using RoboHelp 9 on my site.

Find a Topic

The Find Topic menu option remains but now there is an icon in Project Manager to make the feature more obvious and quicker to access.

Opinion

Nice changes and welcome. You can design a really good workspace that suits you. But please Adobe, next time give authors some choice in the colour as we have to sit and look at it all day. It's a personal thing but I don't like the chosen colour for RoboHelp 9 and no colour is going to please everyone. Let us choose.