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What Program Do You Use for Software Documentation?
Subject:What Program Do You Use for Software Documentation? From:"Susan W Gallagher" <susanwg -at- gmail -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:48:22 -0700
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Susan W Gallagher <susanwg -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 2:47 PM
Subject: Re: What Program Do You Use for Software Documentation?
To: Paul Weir <Pweir -at- bju -dot- edu>
In my 25+ years in software documentation, I've used older, non-PC based
word processors about 5% of the time, Framemaker about 5% of the time,
AuthorIt about 5% of the time, and good ol' MS Word for the other 85%.
Word has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it's
ubiquitous, so it's easy for your technical staff to review your documents.
Many will say that it can't handle long documents or that it's unstable.
Here's a newsflash - no software is perfect, even Frame has its problems.
And if you spend as much time learning the ins and outs of Word as you would
learning the basics of Frame, you won't have a whole lot of problems.
Whether you and your company would benefit from an XML solution really
depends on what your documentation set looks like. If you have distinct
categories of information, like you'd have in a catalog (name, description,
price, weight, etc.) or in API documentation, or if you have a lot of
repetitive text, an XML solution might be the way to go. But if you can't
label your output as anything more granular than "concept" and "procedure",
XML is probably overkill.
HTH! Welcome to tech writing and good luck!
-Sue Gallagher
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 10:22 AM, Paul Weir <Pweir -at- bju -dot- edu> wrote:
> I just started working as a Technical Writer a couple months ago and have
> been using Microsoft Word thus far to write user-documentation for a couple
> of in-house software programs. I have also recently been interested in
> learning more about using XML for this purpose, but am not sure it would be
> a benefit to me in my small IT department.
>
> So, I ask as a novice, what software do you all use for your technical
> writing and why?
>
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