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Subject:RE: Are you on the cutting edge? (AuthorIT!) From:"Belinda Kelly" <bkelly -at- ebetonline -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 16 Oct 2002 16:25:07 +1000
I currently work for a small software company that sells products to the
gaming industry. Before they decided to get a tech writer in, they had no
manuals or online help and only wanted to get some manuals developed because
their biggest client was complaining. It took me a while to work out what
the 'useful' parts of the program were, as opposed to all the strange,
legacy things in there!
Me: "So, what does this do?"
Developer: "I'm not sure. Fred used to work on that bit of the program and
he's gone now."
Me: "So, what does this do?"
Developer: "We put that in for Client X but they don't use it any more..."
I used Word for about 6 months and it's a bit of a struggle to get it to do
really large documents! My previous job used FrameMaker. After a bit of
research, I switched to AuthorIT. While it's got a steep learning curve (all
the components of your manual are seperate file objects in an
object-orientated database), it creates WinHelp files (among other things)
and exports to Word for print-ready documents and PDFing. I've been quite
pleased with its output so far and the single-sourcing aspects of the
program are pretty nifty. And pretty affordable too, considering the Aussie
dollar's performance this year. (So much for my US holiday next year...)
Now just to persuade the developers to glue the helpfiles to the system...
Regards,
Belinda
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