Adobe Updates FrameMaker and RoboHelp

Now having been retired for almost four years, I haven't been closely following developments in the technical communication field. But my ears perked up when I received an invite to an Adobe webinar for updates to their key technical communication software, FrameMaker and RoboHelp.

FrameMaker was my authoring tool of choice in my last couple of jobs. While Word improved steadily over the years, FrameMaker had it beat hands down in several areas, especially when it came to really large, complex documents. While Word (with the assistance of ThirtSix Software's excellent SmartDocs add-on) could handle 300-page docs, I would never have considered it for maintaining the documentation library for the TSX Quantum Trading Engine, which ran to something over 1500 pages across several documents and was produced in both print and online formats. FrameMaker had a clunky interface compared to Word, but it was stable and fast. 

Adobe updated Frame, as it's affectionately known among tech writers, several times over the last decade, but the last few updates have been somewhat underwhelming. Unfortunately, the latest falls into that category. There are no major product features, just tweaks like being able to have table and header rows in different colours, some additions to search and replace, faster performance in searches, and so on. I have long wished for an update to Frame's typography engine, perhaps by adopting the excellent typography of Adobe InDesign, but no such luck. 

RoboHelp, FrameMaker's companion product for producing online content, also received an update. I can't comment much on that because I haven't used  RoboHelp since before Adobe bought the product. But based on the webinar, updates looked relatively minor. I should note that Adobe completely revamped RoboHelp in the previous release, something I was hoping to see with Frame. Maybe in 2024?

I didn't watch the part of the webinar about Adobe Experience Manager Guides, an online documentation and publishing tool that ties into the Adobe Experience Manager content management system. From what I can see of the information on the product page, it looks slick and may be the wave of the future. 

As for my current situation, I'm still using Word 2013 for the few documents I need to write. I'll be looking at upgrading to Office 365 next year as Office 2013 will be reaching end-of-life. Or maybe I'll just start using LibreOffice, which is free and would more than meet my current needs.