Help Authoring Tool (HAT) Software Market New Technologies
by Ann Green, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — professional technical writing tool
HAT stands for a help authoring tool. It’s a software program used by technical writers to create online help topics, documentation, FAQs, and the like. ~Kesi Parker “ What is HAT”
Technical writers use HATs to make the writing process easier and more productive. Let’s firstly look at leading key players:
As you can see, there are many professional tools are created for tech writing but they are different. Here are descriptions:
MadCap
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 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. ClickHelp is easy to setup and use — no installation, runs in a web browser and supports multiple platforms: Mac OS, Windows and Linux. This makes it easy to author your documentation from any place in the world. It can import content from Microsoft Word, HTML, RTF, CHM, ODT, etc. Can export to CHM, HTML5 Web Help, PDF, DOCX, etc.
Help+Manual
Help+Manual is 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.
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.
HelpSmith
HelpSmith is a help authoring tool that you can use to create HTML Help (CHM), Web Help, Printed Manuals, Adobe PDF, MS Word documents, and ePub eBooks from a single source. HelpSmith includes a rich feature set combined with an easy-to-use user interface with a slight learning curve. Among the advanced features available in HelpSmith is the built-in Image Tool that significantly simplifies the way of writing documentation for user interfaces. For example, you can easily capture screenshots, create various annotations for images (balloons, arrows, ellipses, text labels, etc.), add clickable hotspots, and also use control annotations for UI elements that can be exported into the help topic where you can provide a detailed description for each control.
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 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. Forget about bloated user interfaces and incomprehensible help authoring tools: HelpNDoc provides the most advanced functionalities in their simplest form.
What tool do you use for technical writing?
