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 can relate to what Kevin and Suzette are talking about. Think of this as a side note.
I used D2H at my previous employer and when I arrived here, I was told to use RoboHelp. As any marketing lit from Madcap will tell you, the people that created Flare used to work on RoboHelp so this is really funny, to me, that Kevin mentioned D2H and Flare by name.
D2H 2.5 (does that date me??) automatically created your TOC based upon headings. A Heading 1 became a book, Heading 2 became the first topic under and I don't remember if it made Heading 3 topics in the TOC or not. Just don't remember. I got to RoboHelp and created some topics and selected the auto create menu option. Everything was in a flat hierarchy.
I needed to use heading levels came from my experience at my previous employer. I just needed to adapt that requirement to the tool I was using and, after looking at the help, and after asking in the RoboHelp forums about it, I was told, "Nope, RH doesn't work that way."
So then I moved on. I did not have a deadline pushing on me for actually quite a while when I was learning RH. That was good. I had the task of documenting an application with 20 icons across the top, each calling a window and multiple sub-windows under each icon. I frequently use those same topics, though they have now been transformed from Word/RTF to HTML and massively *MASSIVELY* been rewritten.
Happy Friday. <grin>
Paul
Kevin wrote:
HOWEVER... a writer who's never seen the particular tool before will necessarily bring to it the approaches and experience s/he's had with other tools.
So, there they are, 7 hours after arriving at your company, dutifully cranking out their first page or
two of Help, as they did it with Doc2Help. But they're using (say) Flare now, with no previous
experience <snip>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Gain access to everything you need to create and publish information
through multiple channels. Your choice of authoring (and import)
formats with virtually any output. Try Doc-To-Help free for 30-days. http://www.doctohelp.com/
---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-
