TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
I liked the Macromedia Fireworks fast track guide for beginners, with useful demo's of what your canvas must look like at the end of a tutorial. Neat stuff. Their help is a bit repetitive and after using the quick start, I figured out the advanced features myself.
The RoboHelp X4 help is the worst I have encountered this far. I tried using the help to merge several WebHelp projects and it was a nightmare. And the fact that nowhere in the help did they even mention that users needed to buy the Merge Module separately didn't help one bit.
The WWP 2003 for Word was effective and exactly what I needed to quickly convert HTML, mpj to Word. Though the output was pathetic, I was able to meet my objective quickly.
Adobe Acrobat 6.0 - fairly easy to use. But considering that generating PDFs almost usually cause agony in various degrees to most writers, their troubleshooting section could do with a lot more work. For example, there is a bug in 5.05 and 6.0 that prevents the PDF make icon from displaying within Word. It displays from within every other Office product. The pdfmaker.dot file is corrupt and there is a fix not easily accessible to most users. We spent nearly a week simply installing, uninstalling and reinstalling Office and Adobe! Not funny at all. In fact there is this FAQ book from Adobe that attempts to address several types of PDF issues, and classifies errors by OS. That's pretty good stuff..but again, simple problems take a backseat and that's frustrating.
