Re: Worries about tools

["David Castro, The Tech Writer" <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

> So I am foolish to count the use of this pair of tools at a company as a big
> X against considering employment with a firm? I really am envious of you guys
> who get to use framemaker, doc to help, and forehelp, etc... No question
about
> it, I have a large MS chip on my shoulder. 

I totally understand where you are coming from. I used MS Word to create hard
copy documentation at the place before last, and when I left there, I promised
myself that I'd never work for a place that does hard copy documentation with
Word. Period.

We were unable to do some of the most common tasks with Word, because they were
too complex, or too error prone. We had no index, and no cross references. We
could barely make multi-file books work. And it wasn't that we didn't have
intelligent writers...far from it! But Word just isn't suited for large
manuals. FrameMaker is.

So, I can understand where you're coming from. But for online help, I found
that Word + RoboHELP worked out okay. I haven't used the combination in a
couple of years, because at my last place, we converted to HTML Help when
RoboHTML 1.0 came out. But, when we did use it, it seemed okay. That's one
person's experience, of course.

Best of luck finding a job that uses the right tools for the job.

-David Castro
 techwrtr -at- crl -dot- com
 thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com

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