Adobe's stepping up their tech writer toolkit?

I'll speculate freely about whether Adobe's working on a tech writer workflow or toolkit, bouncing off of The Content Wrangler's prediction of a Technical Writing Suite from Adobe. (Thanks for the trackback enablement, Scott Abel!) And what a cool concept, a suite of tools that work together to help us tech writers, similar to Adobe's Creative Suite. If the creatives can get such a bundle, why not the technical writers as well?

Here's an interesting article and interview about Adobe's newly sparked interest in RoboHelp. My favorite quote from this article has to be:

"But if Adobe truly intends to market an authoring tool called RoboHelp in 2007, it faces at least two challenges-in the user base and the code base. Macromedia's stewardship did little to improve the RoboHelp technology-its aging kadov-laced HTML editor, the tack-on functions (some 12 years old) and a WebHelp output that's like the bumblebee: it's a miracle it flies. And as for the users-we know that story from several directions. " from David Locke, WordSmith LLC.

Last week I attended the Benefits of Structured Authoring and Migrating in Preparation for XML webinar from Adobe (and played the Yeti batting a penguin Flash game while waiting for the presentation to start, a.k.a Pingu Throw). In it the presenter mentioned a DITA plug-in for FrameMaker (as well as other plug-ins, even though he said you can do all the XML authoring you want to with just FrameMaker. He probably should have qualified that as "FrameMaker plus plug-ins.") Today's seminar starts in about a half hour and it's titled "FrameMaker and DITA" ( register here).

My take? Give us the tools and we'll build some cool information systems. What do you think about bundled software systems geared towards a specific user base?