A question for Tech Writers!

[pyat]

I have a question for all the tech writers on my friend's list, or all the folks in software/process documentation, and related fields.

The set-up is this. I've been a tech writer for about 7 years, but I have absolutely no specific training in the field. I have a generic journalism degree. I sort of drifted into tech writer from general corporate writing. I'm finding myself at a loss because I've had almost no exposure to the software tools used for authoring and documentation.

If I were to enroll in some night classes or continuing education, what software training should I be looking for?

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

RoboHelp is a good one. Ditto FrameMaker. Both of these seem to be in major demand.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

FrameMaker can be best learned by buying it (hideously expensive) along with a hard copy of the user guide, and then using it for a serious project. If you're a tutorial oriented person, then a Peachpit book or similar might be useful, but I'm not sure that a class is going to really give you value for money if it's just focussed on using a tool: really, you're better off in the long run to learn how to use writing tools on your own, but doing something with them. The down-side to Frame is, as I said, the hideous cost. However: Adobe does tend to offer decent educational pricing, so Erin might be able to get your household a copy on reasonably steep discount.

I would also comment, though, that Frame's market share is dwindling as more and more houses that have used it in the past are moving on to XML and Content Management Systems and multi-output-format publishing systems.

Robohelp is (I believe) the software of choice for Windows Help, but I'm not sure how much it flies for other online help systems.

[bill-badger.livejournal.com]

I've used RoboHelp and Madcap Flare for Help authoring. I'd recommend Flare.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

There's software for tech writing? I thought tech writing went the other way around.

Seriously, I think I've been doing things very primitively for the documentation I've written. I'll be interested in reading your experiences in finding training. I've been stuck in the whole one man software development team thing that you see a lot in higher education. I spec, develop, deploy and document everything myself and I know I do thing very simplistically.

[clawfoot.livejournal.com]

I second both RoboHelp and FrameMaker.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

Not actually a technical writer, but have associated with a couple. I've heard Adobe InDesign tossed about as something used, but that, I imagine, depends on the company, and whether they've shelled out for an Adobe license.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

Also seconded. A lot of the Adobe products are in strong demand in various instances.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

InDesign is the tool of choice for doing anything that's reasonably short but heavy on layout. For example, magazine pages, or layout-intensive books. For doing serious technical writing work, that involves lots of cross-referencing, tables of contents and figures, heavy-duty text editing tools, it's not a great place to go. Some of the "tech writing" as opposed to "layout wizard" functionality can be added to InDesign through third-party add-ins, but then the cost starts becoming truly crazy.

For classical. serious technical writing that's still done with desktop software, and with intention of printed page output (i.e. long manuals or documents in traditional form), FrameMaker has been the tool of choice for over two decades. It's expensive and idiosyncratic, but it's still pretty much unmatched for specific kinds of projects.

Pricing and bundling on Frame used to be much more sensible. Now you can buy it on its own for 1000.00 USD; or you can buy "Adobe Technical Communication Suite" containing Frame, RoboHelp, Photoshop, Captivate, Presenter, and Acrobat Pro, for 2000.00 USD. Serious money. However -- it's conceivable that this cost might be nearly the same as an education course once you figured in tuition, books, driving time and costs, etc, and you've got some serious-ass production software there for your money. I'm not sure if either Frame or Tech Comm Suite have educational pricing options, but they might...

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Please note that my comments about InDesign are based on the features it had in CS2. At this point it's several versions on (it's up to CS4 now), and it's quite possible that some of the features that serious, long-task writers value in Frame are available in InDesign (dynamic cross-reference markers for example? not sure).

[n-scale.livejournal.com]

I've been told that some knowledge of DITA and XML (for structured authoring) are becoming increasingly in demand. However, my sources may be unreliable...

Piet: Let me know if you're thinking of taking a course. I might join you. I've used FrameMaker fairly extensively, and fiddled around with RoboHelp in my spare time, but my tools knowledge could certainly use some upgrading.

[n-scale.livejournal.com]

You can take Madcap Flare for a spin at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/downloads/.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Some knowledge of DITA (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita) and XML (http://www.w3.org/XML/) are indeed becoming increasingly in demand. However, as with SGML, DITA and XML seem most commonly found in large institutions that can afford the rather sizeable infrastructure costs around an implementation. DITA/XML is not an off the shelf solution, rather, they're standards that one can use to build a publishing infrastructure.

As a result, I'd suspect that most places that would have writers actually writing content in such a system are probably well capable of training them on the local implementation (and would probably have to in any case).

Someone not yet working within one of these environments would probably do well to become conversant with the standards to the extent that you can explain what they are and roughly how they might be used (and an afternoon or a few days doing research on the intarwebz can probably do that much). However, I'm not sure I'd really expect anyone to come with tooling experience.

If you can get them from a local library, "The Nurnberg Funnel" and "Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel", the first written by John M Carroll, the second edited by him, are fundamental texts around the minimalist practices that informed the development of DITA. They're academic books published by MIT Press, nearly 20 years old, and out of print, so used prices for them are hideously overblown. There are probably more recent texts on the practices of minimalist and topic-based technical writing methods, but I'm not really aware of any of quality I could recommend.