Adobe RoboHelp: Shared Review

by Willam Van Weelden

When creating content within my Help System, I often put my content through a review process. Reviews help to ensure my content is correct and easy to understand.

A recurring question by RoboHelp users is how they can use RoboHelp to gather reviews efficiently. Fortunately, RoboHelp has a review option that allows reviewers who don't own Adobe RoboHelp to review your RoboHelp content. The only thing reviewers need is a PDF of your RoboHelp content, Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader.

Working with shared reviews consists of three stages:

1. Creating a PDF for review
2. The review
3. Importing the reviewer comments into RoboHelp

Create a PDF for Review from Within RoboHelp

In the steps that follow, I will show you how to create a review PDF locally. Saving locally is the easiest way to start a review because you don't have to set up a server or accounts.

1. Open or create a RoboHelp project.
2. Choose Review > Create PDF for Review.
3. In the Create PDF for review dialog box, select any (or all) of the topics, snippets and master pages you want to include in the PDF.
4. From the PDF Settings area, select Save locally.
5. Select Enable commenting in Adobe Reader.

(Note: You will only be able to select this option if you have Adobe Acrobat 10 installed on your computer.)




6. Click OK to create the PDF.

RoboHelp creates the PDF document and opens the document in Acrobat. (If Acrobat notifies you that it will enable commenting, click OK and save the document.)

The PDF is now ready for review. You can now send the PDF to all of your reviewers.

Important: After you create the PDF, don't edit the RoboHelp topics, snippets and master pages that are included in the PDF. The only way you can reliably import comments back into the RoboHelp project is when the content remains unchanged.

Reviewing

Reviewers can review your content using Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader. Using the Annotation tools, reviewers can add comments, remove text, insert text and replace text. When the review is finished, the reviewer simply sends the annotated PDF back to you.

Import Review Comments

Once you receive the review PDF, you can import the comments and changes suggested within the PDF directly into the RoboHelp project.

1. Open the reviewed RoboHelp project.
2. Choose Review > Import Comments from PDF.
3. Click Yes from within the Import comments from PDF dialog box and then open the reviewer's PDF.

Once the import is complete, RoboHelp displays the comments, inserts and deletions similar to the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word.

At this point, you can use a Review toolbar to accept or reject suggested changes within your project.

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