Software Tools for Technical Writing
I often chat with technical writers on Facebook, and recently I’ve realized that some of them are still using MS Word. It’s quite a shock! I think that nowadays no one uses MS Word because it is uncomfortable for the working process and it doesn’t have all those necessary features for creating great documentation. That’s why I want to share with you a list of the most popular technical writing tools. It’s based on the G2 Crowd score that’s formed by customer satisfaction.
MadCap Flare
Whether you need to create technical documentation for online Help, software and API documentation, policy & procedure manuals, knowledge bases or user guides, MadCap Flare allows you to create, manage and publish content to a variety of formats, including print, online, desktop and mobile.
ClickHelp
ClickHelp is a modern browser-based documentation tool to create online user manuals, as well as printed documents in various formats. It is provided as a cloud service, no installation needed — sign up and get your own online documentation portal. ClickHelp is used by software companies all over the world to create online user manuals, knowledge bases, help files, FAQs, tutorials and publish them instantly in their portal. It can import content from Microsoft Word, HTML, RTF, CHM, ODT, etc, and export to CHM, HTML 5 Web Help, PDF, DOCX, etc. This documentation tool has all those powerful features you may need for larger projects.
Help & Manual
Help+Manual is one of the most popular authoring tool for writing and publishing help and technical documentation in multiple formats. While it is as easy to use like Word, Help+Manual gives you the full power of a true WYSIWYG XML editor. You can focus your energy on writing and immediately get productive! This is combined with powerful features for editing documentation files, including full support for multimedia and complex modular projects.
Dr. Explain
Dr.Explain is a help authoring software to create help files, documentation and on-line manuals in CHM, PDF, RTF & HTML formats. Uniquely Dr.Explain captures application screens or web pages and documents them automatically! Dr.Explain is based on a unique interface analysis and screen capture system. Thanks to this system, Dr.Explain can automatically analyze an application’s user interface, take screenshots of all controls and elements, and then add explanatory callouts to all images in the draft help system. After that, all one needs to do is to add descriptions to the callouts and save the result in the HTML, CHM, RTF, or PDF format.
HelpNDoc
HelpNDoc is an easy to use yet powerful help authoring tool which can generate various documentation formats from a single source: HTML and CHM help files, PDF and Word manuals, ePub and Kindle eBooks, cross-platform Qt Help files as well as mobile web-sites for iPhone and Android.
Adobe RoboHelp
Adobe RoboHelp 11 software empowers you to deliver differentiated content for different screens using multiscreen HTML5. Generate stunning responsive HTML5 output with a single click, even for legacy projects, or publish content in EPUB 3, KF8, and MOBI formats.
These are the most famous tools for technical writing. As for me, I use ClickHelp. Its interface is more understandable and user-friendly than Flare’s, for example. ClickHelp uses HTML as a topic source format and gives you an opportunity to host your documentation on their server (as well as export to all popular formats and host somewhere else). It provides various single-sourcing features for content reuse and also allows working on multiple documentation projects in a single tool. Finally, it has nice workflow features for the entire team to collaborate on topic review, and they’ve recently introduced a number of useful reports, some of them are not present in Flare. It’s a powerful tool for me with 200+ features, although I don’t use all of them but I know that ClickHelp can meet all of my demands if necessary.
And what about you? What tool do you use?