It's been an interesting year in the help authoring world. First, eHelp introduced RoboHelp for FrameMaker. Longtime fans of WebWorks Publisher could only gnash their teeth at the slick, modern interface and the ability to have one project with multiple types of output. Then Macromedia bought eHelp, and a few months later RoboHelp for FrameMaker was gone. Not long after that, RoboHelp was on its way out too. A group of former RoboHelp developers started their own company, Mapcap Software, and announced they were developing a new help authoring tool called Flare. Adobe then bought Macromedia, making the future of RoboHelp even cloudier.

Now, Quadralay has introduced WebWorks ePublisher Pro, a complete rewrite of its WebWorks Publisher product. The only thing it shares with its predecessors is the ability to generate online help and the WebWorks name. The program's interface has been completely revamped and is much more modern, although it's not as slick as RoboHelp for FrameMaker.

The workflow in ePublisher Pro is still much the same as it was in WWP. You start by creating a project, selecting an output format, selecting your input files, then converting them. You now have many more options for customization along the way, and all of them are handled through the program's interface. However, you may find that you don't need to do that much customizing - the default settings are surprisingly good. The core engine that creates the output now uses XML and XSLT, rather than WWP's arcane building blocks and macro language. An ePublisher project will now let you output to different formats from the same project, so you don't need to recreate everything when your developers tell you that you need to switch from HTML Help to JavaHelp.

ePublisher Pro allows you to generate a preview that fairly accurately simulates the look of your final online output. You can now override the Style Designer defaults. If you are unlucky enough to have a document that is full of direct formatting, you can set up the online formats in the Document Designer without using styles at all.

If you're considering upgrading from WWP to ePublisher Pro, make sure you're hardware can handle it. Quadralay recommends a 3 GHz system with 1 GB of RAM, and they aren't kidding. I ran my tests on my home system, which is a 1.7 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM, and generating a preview and the final output was slow - quite a bit slower than in WWP. Recent beta releases seem to be faster, and the FrameMaker version appears to be quicker than the Word version, which was also the case with WebWorks Publisher. As with any new product, expect performance improvements and bug fixes over time.

If you're considering migrating from RoboHelp, ePublisher can import RoboHelp projects. I have not tested this feature. It will also import WebWorks Publisher projects, although this option wasn't yet enabled in the beta version I've been testing.

Overall, my first impressions are pretty favourable. As a veteran WebWorks user, I didn't have too much trouble figuring out the new interface, and the quality of the output impressed me. There are numerous customization options I've barely touched on, all available without coding. However, my projects have tended to be fairly straightforward - real WebWorks power users may have different feelings about not having the old macro language to play with. Serious customization jobs will probably require that you learn XSLT; not trivial, but probably no harder than figuring out the WebWorks Publisher macro language. At least resources for learning XML and XSLT are widely available.

I've already requested the upgrade to ePublisher at work. I won't be jumping into it with both feet though; as with the release of any major new tool, I'll start with a small project and keep an eye out for bug-fix releases. But I do expect that six months from now, I'll be using ePublisher for all my online help projects.

Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 18 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site as well as a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children and their cat.