Some tech comm tools allow you to do this, but even the ones that do tend to specialise in one over the others. If you are documenting software (as I have been for the last few years), is the documentation going to be printed, is it to be integrated into the package (in the form of a CHM file) or will it be online? If it’s going to be printed, will there be a PDF and will that be available to download? Whatever the case, you may have to deliver documentation to multiple endpoints. If you are documenting a piece of hardware, your primary endpoint will most likely be print media (to be packaged with the physical product). So, specialist technical communication tools are the way to go, but which ones, there’s so many? That is not easy to answer, not least because it depends on what you are documenting and how your documentation is going to be delivered. Technical communication needs to be flexible, extensible, re-usable and increasingly collaborative. It hamstrings your content by bundling it together with the structure and the formatting in a single document. I like Word, I think it’s a fine piece of software for everyday writing assignments, but it is not a suitable tool for modern technical communications. Surprisingly, despite the proliferation of tech comm tools and applications, it is still in common use in the industry it was my primary tool in my last job and it’s frequently listed in adverts for technical author jobs. My first few user documentation projects (before I started doing it full-time) were written in Microsoft Word. The fact of the matter is Microsoft Word is king and almost all offices have at least some version of the ubiquitous package installed on their workstations. You could also use Google Docs, but I’ve mentioned previously my scepticism about using open, cloud-based applications professionally (*cough* OpenSSL *cough* heart bleed). You could say WordPad is a word processor, but it is very limited and I seriously doubt anyone working in an office would use it professionally. Then there’s Kingsoft Writer, which is not too bad, but not in popular use. It’s still going today and is now developed by Corel. The older generation may mention Word Perfect, which was quite big in the 80s and 90s. OpenOffice Writer is the easy one and there is also its marginally superior, unofficial sibling, LibreOffice Writer. List five word processing applications that are not Microsoft Word. So which ones should an aspiring technical author or an author whose looking to move on in their career add to their repertoire? Word (Processors) The image at the top of the page shows the logos for many of the more popular tools and applications, but that’s not all of them by any means. Novice writers simply haven’t been in the industry long enough to build up any product knowledge, while experienced authors (especially those who have stayed in the same job for a long time) are probably using the same or similar tools to the ones they started out with. In fact there are so many different tools that perfecting any more than a handful of them is a challenge for all technical authors, both novice and experienced. It’s not surprising then that so many recruitment agencies list a daunting array desirable tools experience for technical communication jobs. Not only have the products been different at every company (from home computers and peripherals, to video game development tools, to payroll software and now television broadcasting equipment), the tools I have used to create my documentation have changed too. I have been a full-time technical author for 8 years and in that time I have worked for four different companies.
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