[thelist] Practices: -- What tools are best for Technical Doc ument Creation

Fortune Elkins fortune_elkins at summithq.com
Fri Jun 22 15:39:32 CDT 2001


hiya!

in my former life i was a tech writer who made help systems. forgive me!
<Grin>

the answer to this question completely depends on what you want to send to
your users. if you want to continue sending PDFs, then pagemaker or
framemaker would be fine. i personally think framemaker is superior for
extremely large documents with many related sections. 

do you need to supply online or html help pages? in that case you might want
to consider tools like robohelp, doc-2-help, etc. that use word or
dreamweaver files to create microsoft help in both windows 95 and windows
html help formats. 

there are filters for framemaker, i believe, that allow you to export
documents so they can be compiled into the different flavors of windows
help. there is also software that allows you to take html pages and create
macintosh help as well.

personally, i think a database solution is always best. there are several of
these. i would rush over to the yahoo group HATT (help authoring tool
technology) and ask the expert tech writers what they would do with a
project like yours. give 'em all the gory details and see what they say.

hth,
f

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