Acrobat 8’s Help: A Review
Few people pay much attention to help files. Like the proverbial (and now nearly extinct) Printed Software Manual, most users only crack open the Help menu when in extremis. The preferred method is to blunder though dialogs and settings on a hunt for magic buttons. It takes a serious stumbling block to convince today’s user to sit down for a document that often reads like it was written by Orac.
I’m something of a connoisseur of help systems (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the topic), so I thought I’d take a moment to highlight some changes in the way Help content is presented in Acrobat 8.
The Changes
First, Adobe has seemingly abandoned the practice of deploying Acrobat help in PDF form. Acrobat 8 does NOT install ACROHELP.PDF, the traditional conveyance for Acrobat’s Help, at all.
This is, frankly, a welcome development. ACROHELP had become a bit ridiculous, itself a bloated demonstration of why a PDF is NOT always the right format for all content and all contexts, even when the content in question is the official Acrobat documentation itself.
In Acrobat 7, Adobe had resorted to dressing up the ACROHELP file with a specialized (and fairly unappetizing) PDF viewer. With Acrobat 8, Adobe went with functionality over sentiment, delivering an Acrobat help system rather than a “make do” PDF file.
In the new “Complete Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional Help” powered by the Adobe Help Viewer version 1.0, help contents are presented in a crisp, clear navigation system. Breadcrumbs at the top of the page tell you where you are. Pages often include related subjects as expansions of the page, far superior to endless, droning content. This all encourages exploration, and thus, learning.
I find the copy improved overall compared with Acrobat 7’s help - perhaps by association with the slicked-up interface.
The Help system has facilitated several entry-points since Acrobat 6. In Acrobat 8, the “How to” method has been cleaned up, and now appears in the Navigation Panel to the left of the page, as it should. The stand-out new feature of Help, however, has to be the all-new “Getting Started” interface, which does a good job of introducing a variety of higher-end functions to office-workers.
Still a PDF around here somewhere
A PDF version of the Help file remains, but it’s located on the installation disc, and is not installed by default. This file is now properly paginated, to better serve those users who prefer their documentation printed. Thus, it is now possible to say, with feeling; “Oh, go look it up on page 323 in the Acrobat Help file, sonny-boy”.
Summary
With the new Getting Started interface, the new Help offers something new to bridge the gap between user understanding and application terminology. Acrobat needs a lot more help along these lines, but the direction is encouraging. There’s more to do - especially when it comes to recognizing and facilitating user intent - but the changes to Help in Acrobat 8 are praiseworthy.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Duff,
Just joined Acro Users so that I could reply to your evaluation of the Acrobat Help. I know it is heresy in the world of exciting online Help options to say this, but we have decided to pitch our HTML help for Web-based app’s and go to PDFs. We will be using destinations for context-sensitive links. (Thank goodness they work again in Acro. 8!) I’ve been considering how we can format and structure the documents to make them more Help-like and helpful for users (while still being documents), and your evaluation has actually given me several good ideas.
The problem that caused us to go in this direction was/is (what else?) time and resource constraints that constantly pressure us. By eliminating the Help-development cycle, we have more time to focus on content, which is the most important thing, after all. And I don’t care if you are using Frame/WebWorks, Word/RoboHelp, or some other combination of tools, Help development is time consuming and high risk in terms of generation problems and (in the case of Word, which is what we’re required to use), keeping content the same between doc and Help source.
Even if we could set up WebWorks with Word and use their version of “conditional” text for single sourcing, it’s a large amount of work, and we don’t have the time or budget that allows us to do that. Never mind hidden difficulties that might lie with that solution. (Do I sound defensive about our solution?)
We are in a conservative industry, and several of our biggest customers (and they are ) absolutely love PDFs, so we have that in our favor.
Would be interested in your comments. I hope we can make it work and not look too-o-o clunky. Thx much.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
GloriaMC,
Thanks very much for your Comment! Much appreciated.
I’m going to generate a full-fledged (rather than strictly off-the-cuff) answer to your very good question, and I’ll post it as a new Blog post in a few days - so check back soon!
So thanks for asking!
February 9th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
[…] This post was inspired by new AcrobatUsers.com member GloriaMc, who wrote a very nice comment on an earlier post regarding the Acrobat Help file. […]