Helper Software

Everyone in the content profession has a favorite--or required--primary application set to use for architecting, authoring, managing, and deploying content. I frequently get questions from clients and students about what tools I use. The answer: it depends. In a series of posts, I'll say a few words about some tools that I use frequently.

Today's post discusses some graphics and authoring/publishing tools.

Graphics

• Adobe Illustrator--for its sophistication as a drawing tool for complex illustrations and for its relatively clean import of files output from CAD programs


• PaintShop Pro--for its ease of use for simple drawings, screenshots, and graphic format conversions

Authoring

• Interleaf--for its sophistication and power as a technical publishing tool. Sigh. Interleaf, at least when I last used it at IBM, is an intuitive, full-featured technical authoring and publishing tool. It has fallen out of favor in the USA because of its high cost "per seat." However, many technical communication teams in India still use this tool (illustrating the fact that a better tool leads to improved productivity and, thus, reduced costs). A great feature of Interleaf is its "documentation set/library" feature. An author can apply formats, conditions, and so forth to an entire library of documents in one fell swoop. Interleaf plays well with SGML and its modern subset, XML.



Interleaf is the "gold standard" for technical authoring and publishing.



• Adobe FrameMaker--for, well, just about any technical authoring, input, and output formats. Three of the significant strengths of FrameMaker are part of its very concept ("frames"). FrameMaker has long implemented a kind of structured authoring; that is, the content and the format are (mostly) separate. This is, by far, the most important feature of the application. Design and architecture experts can create the "format," writers can author the content, and editors can apply (or reapply) the format--all without stepping on each other (much). What FrameMaker has lacked, though, is the content management piece. Authoring in the DITA model can provide additional separation of content and format, paving the way for reusable and repurposeable content. A second great feature is import by reference (think links). The value of importing objects by reference instead of embedding them becomes apparent when working with a large, dynamic graphics database and with large graphics files. Maintain the graphics in a separate database and update them as needed; they will update automatically in FrameMaker. Note that this is not the same as dynamic content. The source still must be published to the desired output type. The third feature that is noteworthy is the "book" concept, which allows one to create custom documents from the same content simply by building a different book. Unfortunately, format templates can be applied from within a book, which is great, but they attach to the chapter/section files themselves. To use different formats, the templates must be reapplied rather than simply specified for a build.



To support multiple output formats, multiple "chapter" book-paradigm content, engineering documentation, the level of detail and control required for regulated industries, and standards-compliant content, FrameMaker continues to be the best technical publishing tool out there.



• MadCap Flare--for XML-based technical authoring and publishing. The MadCap suite of tools focuses on outputs: web, print, and mobile. In situations where there are few legacy documents, smaller documents, and a lessened focus on standards and style compliance, a "modern," XML-based authoring environment is the way to go.



MadCap is a great modern tool to use for multi-channel support, particularly with its addition of mobile outputs.



• Microsoft Word--for its pervasiveness. It is part of the basic Office Suite on virtually every Wintel system and available as a free download to practically every university student in the USA. This "free" price can be misleading, though. What is the lost-productivity cost of trying to make the tool do things for which it was not designed? The 2010 version has some improvements in the equation editor and a few other areas. There are many aspects of technical publishing that you can make work in Word--sort of--but you may have a few choice words with Word along the way. I believe my first workplace expletive resulted from trying to get Word to correctly number paragraphs. Word has a "master document" feature to handle the book or multiple-chapter document paradigm. It can be made to work, generally. And forget about reuse in the proper sense: the format and the content is tightly coupled in Word, although the Styles and design features continue to improve with each iteration.



Word is not a technical publishing tool, but it is a great word processor that everyone has.

There are many more tools that I use weekly or even daily, some complex or specialized, some more prosaic but no less useful. These posts peek under the hoods of geek-toys in my professional garage; your mileage may vary.

Disclaimer: Many of these are Adobe tools. That's not because I love Adobe so much. In fact, I use their software in spite of the often poor customer support and decidedly non-friendly attitude toward software for education.