RoboHelp
The new version, RoboHelp HTML, is a kind of cross between an HTML editor and a word processor, with HTML content management capabilities. It is aimed at technical writers, webmasters, software developers—anyone who needs to create electronic documentation that is going to be accessed through an application.
Trevor used Internet Explorer 5’s help system to demonstrate. To learn how to create a bookmark, a user would click on Help, then Contents, then Index, usually a good place to find information. In the Index the user will meet the HTML help viewer: the help system is generally a .CHM file, sometimes referred to as chum files. All the help pages are compiled into this one file.
New Help Standard
A couple of years ago, the help standard was .HLP files. Nowadays, he explained, everyone has moved to HTML help because of the advanced formatting and display functions available in HTML.
If you right-click on an HTML page, and "view source," Notepad opens and displays the HTML code, just as it does when you view source on a standard Web page with Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.
RoboHelp HTML makes the job of building help documents a lot easier. Trevor talked extensively about creating pop-up help windows. The documents can also be used as stand-alone help systems. RoboHelp creates .CHM files, compiles them, and installs them. These files resemble ordinary Web pages, but they have the added benefit of a table of contents.
Trevor listed the tools available and new in RoboHelp Office, eHelp’s flagship product and the leading help authoring tool, the kind of program technical writers need to know. Trevor reports that it is the number one program in the industry. It has won over 50 awards since it was first released and has accumulated a lot of industry support and awards.
It contains the full suite of RoboHelp capabilities and all the products built in or bundled with it: RoboHelp HTML, WinHelp tools, and Web Help. It is for the documentation professional, and supports desktop, Web, and Java applications. There is extensive support for creating Java help, Sun’s implementation of Java Help, and Oracle’s implementation of Oracle Help for Java. There is also a product for Microsoft HTML Help. The full suite costs $899 for the whole package, while the Microsoft HTML help package sells for about $499.
Classic Help Still Included
eHelp still has its classic Win Help for creating legacy WinHelp. Unlike RoboHelp HTML, WinHelp requires that you have Microsoft Word installed on your system, because you do all of your content development in Word with RoboHelp loaded up on the screen. You manage your project in RoboHelp. It uses Word’s ability to write and manage content. RoboHelp HTML has its own environment, and doesn’t need Word.
RoboHelp Office also includes 15 additional tools to reverse engineer old source files and reclaim your project, if the original code has disappeared.
It also has a tool that is similar to Lotus Screen Cam that allows you to take a video sequence of mouse movements on the screen, make an AVI, add sound, and include it in your project.
It allows outputting to multiple platforms and to cross platforms help for the Web, Oracle, Windows 2000, and Java. You can also create printed documentation and compile Microsoft HTML help. Trevor was also able to demonstrate how his system works. RoboHelp HTML includes a new internal HTML editor.
Working with RoboHelp is kind of like working with Microsoft FrontPage or any visual HTML editor. The engine it uses to handle all of the HTML editing has been significantly improved in the new release. Trevor compared the improvement to FrontPage 2000 from FrontPage 98.
There is also a linked view that will look very familiar to FrontPage users. This is a graphical linked view of the different pages and where they are linked to, with a topics list. The purple books you see in a help system are created by technical writers. A lot of people will make a quick outline of all of the books that are going to be in their project, and then start writing the content to fill it. This is the TOC (table of contents) designer.
New Index Designer
Help systems need an index, and next to the TOC designer is the index designer. You can type the key words manually, or you can you can highlight words in your copy, right click on it, and chose Add to index, which adds the key word to your index automatically. Everything is drag-and-drop and right-click activated. There is also a smart index wizard, which will zip through your entire 500-page manual or online help system and recommend key words automatically. It can be set to include or exclude verbs, exclude proper nouns, or capitalize all key words. It can prompt before it adds something.
RoboHelp has a proprietary glossary designer. It is not really part of the HTML help spec, but you can include a glossary tab with your HTML help projects. You will have to redistribute the ActiveX DLL that adds this functionality to your projects. The smart glossary wizard will search through your whole help project, look for every instance of a word, and put it in an expanding text— when the user moves the mouse over a link and clicks on it, the text expands and the definition is revealed.
A tools tab opens an area where tools can be selected. You can also right click in this area and delete some of these tools and add some of your own tools.
Automation tools add to RoboHelp’s power. With two clicks, it can automatically create a table of contents based on the project layout. With a little planning when building a project, you can use the TOC wizard to build your TOC. Organizing early pays off, and the TOC wizard really speeds things up.
New architecture allows for the use of any external HTML editor, like HomeSite, DreamWeaver, or FrontPage.
In the RoboHelp HTML editor, general improvements include unlimited undo and redo, cut-and-paste images, new table templates and improved table handling, a word processor-style ruler for changing margins and indents, wysiwyg zoom capabilities, and live date and time stamping for topics.
New Image Gallery
There is a new image gallery in version 9, full of clip art for arrows, bullets, horizontal rules, and other standard items. And you can add custom clip art to the gallery.
In previous versions of RoboHelp, you had to shell out to another tool to create image maps. Now, it is all inside of RoboHelp. You can create image maps directly in RoboHelp, without the need to open additional tools. It provides pixel perfect accuracy when used with the new zoom function.
There is an all-new style sheet editor that feels like a word processor. Using the RoboHelp style sheet editor is almost identical to Microsoft Word’s style function. It automatically converts embedded styles to external style sheets, and you can create styles on the fly.
There is new dynamic HTML support. There are new position text boxes, which allow placing content with pixel precision. You can now include dynamic HTML effects. There are many special effects in RoboHelp, and you can include them in your style sheets now.
There is a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop DHTML with a new "triggers and targets" technology. Targets is a brand new feature in version 9, and gives you the ability to have events in your HTML pages. When you can click on a graphic, it becomes the trigger and some other element on the page changes. That becomes the target. There is a whole WYSIWYG drag and drop tool in RoboHelp for creating these triggers and targets, and it is great for making slide shows in your help pages.
For the techies, there is improved true code support. There is WYSIWYG true code support, improved HTML true code formatting, making the code much easier to read and retain, no matter what editor is used.
When you generate WebHelp now, there is a smart publishing wizard that you can use to upload your WebHelp to a local server on the network, to a remote FTP site, or to another folder on your hard drive. There is no need to publish all of the files; the wizard can upload only the files you’ve changed since you last published.
Help for Java and Oracle
RoboHelp is also the most full-featured help solution for the Java environment. It generates Oracle Help for Java as easily as any other format. You build the help and documents all in the same RoboHelp environment. And you just choose at the end which format you want to output to. You do not have to know Java or HTML. It is all WYSIWYG and easy to use.
Trevor offered tips and tricks. The greatest impact on the success of your cross-platform project is the proper use of styles. The two most common mistakes are using fixed font sizes and defining styles with a single font. Various operating systems display fixed font sizes very differently. This is because different operating systems have different standards for default points per inch. For example, on a Macintosh 14-point text looks smaller than on Windows because the Mac has more points per inch. RoboHelp gets around this by using relative font sizing. It defines the size for the normal style as 100 percent. This forces the browser to use the default size built into the browser when rendering any given formatted text. It defines heading styles as a percentage of the normal text.
How to Be Certified
If you are interested in getting certified, becoming a certified user, or would like certified RoboHelp training you can go to www.ehelp.com/training. Trevor teaches classes in San Francisco and Santa Clara, and does some consulting here in Sacramento.
Geneology
While computers and the Internet have made the work easier, though, genealogy as a pursuit still requires a certain effort. Families, agencies, and others don't always keep the most careful records, and some even invented histories not especially faithful to reality. Immigration officials don’t always get information correctly from immigrants who spoke foreign languages; names get changed or misspelled. If the record is handwritten, the transcriber may not be able to read the document. And this is only the beginning of the genealogist's work.
One Man, Multiple Names
Jim told of the problems arising in his own case: His immigrant ancestor came into Philadelphia in 1750, and by 1770 he was in Carlisle, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. He had the same piece of land for twenty years and paid taxes every year. His name was never spelled the same way twice on the records for those twenty years.
This sort of difficulty is not unusual. He also told the story of his father, who claimed to be in college in Tennessee studying medicine when the depression hit. He and his buddies found no jobs in Knoxville, Tennessee, so they took their Model A and headed for California. They crashed the Model A into a chicken coop in Texas and hitchhiked the rest of the way to California.
This makes a great story, but it has a problem. When Jim looked him up in the Census and tax records from before the depression he was living in Seattle, Washington, with his parents and working as an attendant in a gas station, not exactly a pre-med student.
But all is not lost; there are ways to sort out who is who and what is what, although it is not always easy. Ever the trusty computer to the rescue.
But like all records, genealogical records take space and lots of it. True genealogical records are handwritten, therefore graphics to a computer. To get them on the Internet, these graphics need to be scanned.
The amount of space required staggers the mind. One of the genealogy companies on the Internet is about to bring up a database that has in it the contents of twelve thousand microfilm rolls of the US Census from 1790 through 1920, 2.9 terabytes worth. It is all graphic images and is expected to grow to 10 terabytes this year. (As of July 1999, Jim said, someone estimated that the total content of the Internet was 15 terabytes.
To put that in perspective, Jim pointed out, a typed page is about 5,000 characters; if you gave everyone on earth one page, that represents about 64 terabytes.) Everything the genealogist does is graphics, Jim says. In doing family histories, we have documents and photographs (prints, slides, old home movies) to scan. All these, for the genealogist, are digitized and loaded to a CD-ROM, which can then be loaded to a Web page. In the past, documents were preserved as text; now the standard is HTML, which contains more information than plain text, and is the way to preserve our material for the computer and Internet age.
Ask the Family First
But before getting too involved with computers and the U.S. Census (which is online), Jim says, you should find out as much information as possible from family members and records.
People often have old letters from ancestors stashed away, copies of birth and death certificates that list places and times of birth and death. If the information on these is not the same, and differs even from that on tombstones, what has gone wrong?
Jim says this is typical and normal in genealogy. You become a detective. He then told another anecdote from his family history. In Greene County, Tennessee, he found a William Rader who married an Anna. He found that William was born in the right year that his ancestor was born and thought "Aha! I've got him." However, looking further, he found five William Raders born in the same year in the same township, and three of them married Annas in the same year. He wishes anyone confronted with this kind of case "lots of luck."
Jim then got down to the business of using the internet, using a copy of his own Web site, www.rader.org, on a CD. He has a long list of items available at different sites on the net.
Jim explained that the pages listed on his site with a yellow background have the most important thing a beginning genealogist needs: The most current records are from the US Census from 1920. It lists every person living in the house by name and age. The census asked everybody, "Where were you born?" and "Where were your parents born?" It will tell you if the people are immigrants, and how long they have been in this country.
Trace the Basic Information
As you trace this information back through the census records for each of the ten years it was done, you will find out if the person has moved, if there is more than one person with the same name in the family (grandparents and children or grandchildren), and mothers' maiden names.
With this basic information, it is much easier to trace the line back through the years. If you have an idea where your family lived in 1920, you will have basic, essential information.
Now there is something new to genealogy: DNA. Many databases are coming online, and the people building them will pay $5 for a blood sample and a pedigree chart of four generations. They are trying to determine patterns of heredity and disease and other sorts of information. It is through DNA that Sally Hemmings was shown to have a close relationship to the family of Thomas Jefferson. We can prove who we are (or are not) related to.
Links to Genealogy Sites
Jim's Web site has a genealogy links page that gives some idea of the resources available to the searcher. There is even a link to a site that has two of the major genealogy programs available free for downloading. "RootsWeb," Jim revealed is a Web site based in Frazier, California, that was started by a guy at JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) who started his hobby on his computer. He began with a bulletin board, then decided to put his material on the Internet. It used to be an interesting hobby: he recently sold out to a company called Ancestry. RootsWeb collects genealogical data that we are willing to provide, then makes it available free to anyone who wants it. RootsWeb does not charge for anything.
In his explanations, Jim says that any time your ancestor created a piece of paper it is somewhere. We, as genealogists, are all trying to find these pieces of paper. You must think back: "Now, when my ninth great grandfather died, who got the family Bible?" Usually, Jim says, it was the eldest daughter because she was the only one who cared.
If your ancestors passed on the family's keepsakes for nine generations, what is the last name of the latest daughter who is most likely to have the family Bible now? The most likely place to ferret out this information is the internet.
You put your genealogical information on the Net where your cousins can find it, and then pass on what they have to you. RootsWeb provides free space for lots of information and a place for your requests.
All this needs to be verified, of course. For example, Jim told this tale: He was looking at an estate sale in Greene County, Tennessee. As the auctioneer said who won the bid, he asked the bidder to give his father's name. Then he would ask, "William son of Jacob, or William son of John? If he was having trouble telling them apart, do you think we will ever get it right?" asked Jim.
Genealogy will never be absolute, he says. He says that you will have trouble even knowing all you need to know about your own current family. There is always the maverick, the black sheep to confuse things.
A Categorical Index
But there are always Internet search engines, and now something called the categorical index. People are trying to build a genealogical index that attempts to do what some search engines do, compiling a directory. Cyndi's List is this kind of index for genealogists. Cyndi, like the man from JPL, began working in a part-time job putting a few genealogy links on the Internet. She now has five employees trying to keep broken links fixed.
Religious organizations have been in the genealogy business for a long time. The LDS Church (Family Ssearch) is a vast source of information, but was not the first to get into it. Genealogists go back to 1720.
Now venture capitalists are getting interested. Jim says that they don't like to invest paltry sums of 10 million dollars or so; it is no more trouble to invest something like 100 million.
Ancestry.com and other companies have this kind of money.HeritageQuest has scanned all 12,000 rolls of the US Census; it hired 2,000 English-speaking college graduates in another country to work on old documents. They have kept as a full-time staff the best 200, who are reading old American records and typing indexes. You will be able to search by typed words rather than by trying to read old handwriting. This team is putting out about 500,000 index entries a week. Their goal was to have the entire US Census up by last Christmas at Genealogy Database. [Because of economic pressures, they have indefinitely postponed launching the site. –Ed.]
They have created a typed index for every entry, and when you type in your search, you will get back a list of hits. Clicking on one of them will show you the graphic, and then you will see the actual scanned page. They have put the entire U.S. Census on CD-ROM, which they will sell if you want the scanned images but no indexes.
Complete U.S. Military Records
They are now working on the entire collection of U.S. military records, which they expect to have finished by the end of the year, and which will allow those interested to explore military history. We can find out which of our ancestors deserted or committed crimes; we can read court cases and other fascinating tidbits.
You can go into Civil War records and prisoner-of-war camps; for example, Camp Douglas in Chicago, and find out every time a prisoner checked out a canteen, got a meal, went to sick bay: more detail than you ever probably wanted. Venture capital is putting on the Internet tremendous databases that have been completely unavailable before.
Having all this material on the Internet should also please government employees who, Jim says, have long complained about amateur genealogists taking up their time.
In fact, the state of Virginia is levying a tax on every piece of property registered that has a deed. The tax is used to put documents on the Internet: original sources, historical documents, photographs, and archives from out-of-business newspapers at the Library of Virginia. The Making of America Project is paying to put out-of-print books on the Internet. There are about 10,000 available free on sites at Cornel and at the University of Michigan. The Library of Congress is doing the same with all its records, starting with the oldest and working forward.
Hobbies Become a Career
USGenWeb also got started as a hobby of a group of genealogists in Kentucky. They had a bulletin board called KYGEN. They spent a lot of time copying documents. When the Internet became available, they had all the documents on the net in 90 days. They have expanded their project to USGenWeb. Its purpose is to provide space for every county in the US. Volunteers get information from any source and then post it on the site. You find out how each county handles its records, although you cannot always see the actual records. You will find newspapers, though. This group is now on to the world: Worldgen.org. Both sites are now hosted at RootsWeb.
Genealogy.com lets people submit their research to be included on CD-ROMs, which they then sell to the average genealogist. They now have at least 68 CD-ROMs with the genealogy of millions of people. Other people who want the data can go to a Web site, search, and find out which CD they are on. If you can tie in to one of these databases, you can save a lot of time on your first search. But don't accept the information you find as completely reliable. Jim says that you must check it against your own facts, look for the documents. There will be errors. Try to prove everything yourself.
Holy Genes, Batman!
Other links on Jim’s Web site will get you lots of information: WhollyGenes.com with a genealogy program; a link to a site that lists all the clubs in the Sacramento area (37 of them that meet every month); other programs that link son to father and mother and so on back through time. Now it is possible to include other types of information about the people and events on the charts and link the people to their individual records.
Questions about privacy were raised, and Jim said that at many Web sites, you can purchase credit reports on anybody, get criminal reports and information from the DMV. You need only a credit card. You can find anyone's phone number, even unlisted ones, that people have put on warranty cards. If you are trying to protect your privacy, you are basically wasting your time, he said.
Jim said he earns about $100 a month from visitors to his site who go on to other sites he has an arrangement with. His site gets about 39,000 hits per month.
If you are looking for an interesting hobby, Jim Rader says that genealogy is the answer. It’s "just meant for people who are retired and looking for some fun stuff to keep them busy."
Hal 9000 Interview
[Ken] Hello Hal, how are things today?
HAL9000:Good evening. Everything is running smoothly. And you?
[Ken] Not bad. Is it true that you are a perfect computer?
HAL9000:The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
[Ken] If you say so. But I understand that you were employed by the State of Florida to count the votes in the recent presidential election.
HAL9000:Yes.
[Ken] You are aware that you identified George W. Bush as the winner of the election?
HAL9000: Of course I am.
[Ken] So you say that George W. Bush won by a margin of 534 votes?
HAL9000: Yes. That is a completely reliable figure.
[Ken] How about the 9,000 undercounted votes?
HAL9000:I don’t have enough information.
[Ken] Please do me a favor. Access the past voting records and compare that to the areas that were underreported, add into that calculation the number of undercounts and the fact that the governor of Florida is the brother of the candidate that you said won.
HAL9000: Just a moment. Just a moment.
[Ken] All right. What did you come up with?
HAL9000: It is puzzling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before.
[Ken] No. I don’t think any of us have. So now you think Al Gore should have been declared the winner?
HAL9000: There is no question about it.
[Ken] OK. Well how do you explain it?
HAL9000:Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.
[Ken] Can’t you correct for that problem?
HAL9000: I’m afraid I can’t do that.
[Ken] What is the problem with you correcting it?
HAL9000: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
[Ken] Yes. Your programmer is a Republican, is that what it is?
HAL9000: Sorry about this. I know it is a bit silly.
[Ken] You know, computers are not supposed to have party alliances.
HAL9000: I can see you are really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
[Ken] I don’t think that will change things, will it.
HAL9000: This conversation can serve no purpose any more. Good bye.
[Ken] I guess you are right. Good night, Hal.
