We welcome your contributions! Please email me with any suggestions for improving this site. Twitter @hypertexas 
- John Daigle
Adobe Certified Captivate/RoboHelp Instructor

Lots of Resource Links!

About the site
Brief bio about John
This site includes demos, screencasts and other eLearning tutorials covering Adobe Captivate 9 and Adobe RoboHelp (2015 Release)

You may also be interested in John Daigle's MayaGlypher.com blog covering a different kind of "technical writing" - that of Maya hieroglyphs!

 

 Show Me the Demo!

2 Days of Tech Comm Intensity
for Practitioners, Academics, and Students
Join me for this special WritersUA event in Tacoma, Washington. I'll be speaking at two sessions.

The Tech Comm Conference is being held in partnership with the Writing Studies department at the U. of Washington Tacoma. 

 

One of the biggest challenges for an author is to help the reader find the most relevant content. Users can be overwhelmed as they wade through huge knowledge bases and often give up looking out of frustration. An emerging solution is to let the user filter content according to categories (roles, location, etc.) While some faceted navigation principles are universal, John will use the Dynamic Content Filtering techniques unique to Adobe RoboHelp to demonstrate these tips.

  • How your end users can “self-select” the content they want to locate
  • Creating content categories (such as Roles, Locations, Product Segments, etc.)
  • Delivering personalized content, customized “on the fly”, including the Table of Contents, Index and Search to deliver the most relevant content
  • Deploying these filtering techniques in Responsive HTML5 Design Layouts

A team authoring environment brings challenges. Shared text, tables, screenshots and multimedia assets are often changed or updated. Somehow they must be kept “in synch” among the authors. At the same time, chunks of repetitive content are often reused for different audiences (in-house vs. public facing) and different outputs (print vs. online.) This session will explore solutions to help manage these challenges. While many of these techniques are not tool-specific, John will use Adobe RoboHelp 2017 to demonstrate these tips:

  • User Defined Variables (UDV) – A project-wide technique to manage changes to product names, prices, “boilerplate” snippets. You can manage those contingencies quickly using a UDV placeholder. Use a script to universally retrofit a project and create variables on the fly
  • Snippets – Convert paragraphs, tables, screenshots and even multimedia tutorials to a snippet and make it possible to populate changes throughout a website in one go
  • Conditional Build Tags (CBT) – CBTs help you customize content for multiple audiences, yet maintain a single content source
  • Low tech alternatives to source-control – use “Live Linking” of assets such as CSS, master pages, images, multimedia and PDFs to keep authors on the same page

Adobe RoboHelp (2017 release) ready for download

"In the tradition of innovation, Adobe RoboHelp (2017 release) remains the only help authoring tool that has a way for my end-users to zero in on the content they need with personalized Dynamic Content Filtering. This works according to role, location, product, or any other category the author needs to define. No other tool comes close."
—John Daigle, Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor, Evergreen Online Learning, LLC
New Adobe Captivate 9 Launched

http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate.html

Major New Features and Enhancements from the Adobe Captivate 9


    More Videos here!

    • Adobe Captivate Draft — Convert your ideas into storyboards complete with eLearning elements such as content and question slides, branching, and more.
    • Enhancements to Responsive — Creating responsive courses is even more powerful with ability to add five breakpoints and many more enhancements.
    • Multi-state objects — Convert objects to multi-state objects to easily create interactive content.
    • Effects and motion paths — Apply motion path effects and transitions to your responsive projects.
    • Asset store — Get free access to a library of 25,000+ exclusive eLearning assets.
    • In-product LMS preview — Directly preview content on SCORM Cloud.
    • iOS device capture — Record your iOS device screen as a full resolution HD video.
    • Knowledge check questions — Add knowledge check questions which do not interfere with the quiz score and LMS reporting.
    • SVG support — Create high-quality responsive courses with vector graphics that scale across devices and sizes with absolutely no loss of quality and edit and roundtrip with Adobe Illustrator.
    • Publish to Adobe Captivate Prime — Directly publish your courses to Adobe Captivate Prime LMS.
    • Quiz review buttons — Use Back and Next buttons, that show up just during Quiz review.
    • Geo-location enhancements — Apply project level geo-location action and emulate locations during preview.
    • Delay next action — Delay the next actions or a set of actions by a defined wait time.
    • Actions in PI – Continue action optional — Detach Continue action from the simple actions in Properties Inspector.

     

 

 

  
 
Congratulations to my Adobe RoboHelp and Adobe Captivate students at Metropolitan University of Denver. They received college credit toward their Tech Comm degree.

Announcing a free Flare to RoboHelp Project Converter

For MadCap Flare™ authors who are upgrading to Adobe® RoboHelp® At WritersUA and STC Summits, folks have asked me if it was possible to convert a MadCap Flare™ project to an Adobe® RoboHelp® 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11 project. Now with this converter you can in most cases. It's an easy way to return to the familiar favorite, RoboHelp, or if you just want to migrate to an easy-to-use tool that is powerful, author-friendly and is part of the new Adobe Technical Communication Suite.

To receive the converter

(Please email john@johndaigle.com and I will send it to you directly.)

John Daigle offers onsite and "virtual" instructor-led classes in Adobe RoboHelp and Adobe Captivate

Students rave about our training classes! 
Here are verbatim comments from recent classes.

Adobe Certified Training in:

  • Adobe RoboHelp 
  • Adobe Captivate 
  • Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional

For technical writers and instructional designers email John Daigle for special training class dates or arrange for your own onsite custom training.


Now offering virtual classes 

Adobe RoboHelp News
With thousands of authors around the world using RoboHelp in different environments, Adobe constantly gathers feedback in order to improve the way it works. Here are some items that will help you make sure your version of RoboHelp is working smoothly with the latest improvements.

RoboHelp tips and techniques are often contributed by my instructor/author colleagues. Here is a list of those resources:

  • Peter Grainge's site, a comprehensive and well organized source for all things RoboHelp.
  • Rick Stone's RoboWizard site and his popular  "Skinny on Skins" tips.
  • Colum McAndrew's blog - frequently updated with ancedotes and suggestions.
  • Adobe RoboHelp Forums - peer-to-peer resources operating 24/7 with answers from Adobe Community Expert volunteers. (John Daigle, Peter Grainge and Rick Stone)
  • Adobe Technical Communications blog - for current news from product managers and engineering staff on RoboHelp, FrameMaker and the Adobe Technical Communiation Suite.
  • Bob Doyle who publishes the DITA Newsletter, explains the DITA features of Adobe TCS and how Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe RoboHelp are integrated to work with DITA. 
Adobe RoboHelp Resources Adobe Captivate Resources
 

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