Highlights include an all-new customizable user interface for FrameMaker (revamped to align with the UI of Adobe’s other product offerings), support for DITA 1.1 and the upcoming 1.2 standard, live links to FrameMaker documents in RoboHelp projects and the ability to publish online help in Adobe AIR format. Another focus is improvements to the reviewing process, with better support for accepting and rejecting changes, including the option to import PDF comments as conditional text in FrameMaker and create an AIR application for online reviews.

Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez highlights the new suite features in a presentation, and provides a demonstration of the new products (including a look at the new FrameMaker interface at about 3:20 minutes into the demo).

AIR is beginning to look like an interesting cross-platform option for online help and performance support systems, since you can include typical navigation aids (such as table of contents, index, search, glossary, favorites, etc.), provide auto-updates and even roll in existing PDF content into a standalone package that will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

The AIR runtime is a free download that includes a WebKit browser and Adobe Flash engine to enable desktop use of Internet applications–even offline. So while the technology is fairly new, it may prove very useful in the development of cross-platform help solutions.

[via Silke Fleischer]

• FrameMaker 8
• RoboHelp 7
• Captivate 3
• Acrobat 3D Version 8

The press release touts a “major upgrade to RoboHelp”, but apart from that, it remains to be seen how useful the new bundling scheme will prove as many of those with a need for software like this certainly already own one or more of the tools in the package.