Journalism to tech writing newcomer seeks help for help

[Bart Arenson <barenson -at- DESTINATIONS -dot- COM>]

Hello to everyone-

I'm new to the list, been lurking for about 10 days. Yet another who made
the jump from freelance journalism to technical writing. That thread I'll
defer adding my two cents to for now (save to say I'm learning a lot,
enjoying the paycheck, and have little regret not seeing my byline in print
so far (check out that serial comma, so much for AP style!).

I came on board as a contractor working with two others to finish a software
documentation project. We did it in Word with hundreds of screen shots,
cross references and a thorough index etc. For a guy who was used to just
banging out a thousand word story in Word, emailing to an editor, and
waiting for the paycheck--it was a struggle. I then had sole responsibility
for taking it to pdf before the CD burn for distribution to the users.
Acrobat 4.0 was a pleasure (well documented, great tool, and allowed for
cleaning up the final pdf documents). They must have liked the results
because they hired me as the company's lone technical writer.

Now I'm venturing in to the thicket of finding the right tool for taking
that documentation and turning it into help files within the application.
I've downloaded a few demos (Help Magician Pro, etc.), and had RoboHELP
sales types emailing me their latest deals. But, you guys know best-- and I
still don't have a clue. I need a strategy for getting started. I'm taking a
community college course (description follows), but it doesn't begin until
Oct 30th. I looked at the list archives, got the Horton book from Wiley, but
need more hands-on kind of info. Horton good for the general big picture,
but not much else. Any ideas or strategies?

My course synopsis: Learn how to design, outline, write effective online
help files, and to distinguish a help file from other types of online
documentation with different purposes and audiences. Course work includes
writing a document plan, then designing and writing an industry standard
help file with a table of contents, index, and topics with illustrations,
popups, hypertext links, keywords, index, and context sensitive IDs. Then
with the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop you'll compile it. Text required: The
Official Microsoft HTML Help Authoring Kit.

Regards,
Bart Arenson

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