Lesson 8: The Tools of the Trade
Although there are a wide variety of tools you can use to create documentation, most writers use a few core applications for most of their work. Some documentation is written in Microsoft Word and some in other word processors, but most technical writers use Adobe FrameMaker to write printed books. Tools like Quadralay WebWorks and Adobe Acrobat can take that FrameMaker output and generate HTML and PDF files for end users and professional printers. Online help can also be written using a variety of tools but most technical writers use RoboHelp.
This lesson isn't going to make you an expert in any of these products or even give you a sense of their power and versatility. But it will give you a taste for each of the popular tools and why they're helpful when writing software documentation.
Why not Microsoft Word?
Most people use Microsoft Word for the majority of their word processing needs. It's perhaps the most pervasively used product on the market. A lot of people want to know why they can't just keep using Word when they start writing documentation. The short answer is that you can but you probably shouldn't.
There are plenty of technical writers who do use Microsoft Word to write documentation. It has enough rudimentary word processing features to permit effective output of short documents and can generally be massaged into handling mid-sized or even long documents to some extent. But it lacks many of the features of FrameMaker that make it a more powerful option. For one thing, Microsoft Word doesn't have any concept of books. You just have one or more documents that, as far as Word is concerned, are independent files. You are responsible for maintaining consistency among the table of contents and index. You are responsible for making sure all of the files are kept together, maintain a common style and format, and fit into a single book. Word also provides very limited control over layout and style. For the most part, all files created in Word look the same. It's very difficult to personalize and give your documents a specific corporate look and feel.
