Charless last blog post..Starting a Conversation: The Art of Comment Fetching

You might also want to ask Char James-Tanny at helpstuff.com this question. She’s a strong advocate of AuthorIt, and is knowledgeable about many other tools as well.

Finally, Neil Perlin is a good person to ask also. His blog is here: http://www.hyperword.blogspot.com/

If you use ATS, the online help and captivate integration will look great, but the printed manuals will require manual reformatting. If you use Flare, the online help will look good and the printed manuals will look good (requiring only a little tweaking), but there is a learning curve with this application. It’s not the easiest to use, but with a little bit of study, you can do some amazing things with it. Flare includes Blaze features, so you don’t even need to think about Blaze. Blaze is useful if you’re outputting only to PDF and not to online help.

AuthorIt is excellent as well, but since I’ve never used it, I can’t say much about it other than that it single sources your content well and allows multi-authoring.

I don’t know how much legacy content you have. That’s a huge factor in your decision.

Someone who knows a lot about DocBook is Scott Nesbitt over at DMN Communications. Ask him for his advice too.

Today there isn’t just one solution for help authoring. Sorry I can’t be more help. If you ask around and find your answer, will you please return to this post and leave a new comment about your solution?

I have been writing all of my documentation in straight XML code, using a text editor (vi), and then compiling it using DocBook to produce identical HTML and PDF output. This is very raw single-sourcing, fast and nifty, but I need more direct control. I can’t really control text layout, headers and footers, fonts and colors, sidebars and other document features, and learning advanced DTD/DocBook Stylesheet design is not appealing. I have been considering Adobe Technical Communication Suite along with MadCap’s products and have even taken a look at AuthorIT.

And another thing: We have never produced help files before, just PDF and HTML versions of manuals. We’ve never needed a program like RoboHelp or Flare. But we will. Big time. We are producing new software that will definitely need a built-in help system of some kind. (They are using C++, with the Qt library.)

So now is the time for me to make a decision and learn a new product. And I can pick anything I want and implement it company wide, as I am the whole department.

I have been using Adobe Captivate for training videos, and I like the product very much.

I’d love to import my existing DocBook code into a program’s XML-level editor, find and replace all the tags that don’t work for whatever reason, learn to make the style adjustments using that program’s higher-level tools, and then recompile my documentation into HTML, PDF, and help files. I would also love to incorporate videos into the help files, as you describe.

I’m nervous about going with ATC suite because I’m worried I’ll have to switch to “higher level” formatting of a proprietary file format and I won’t be able to drop down to the precise control of tagged, standardized text. I’m worried that ATC isn’t a true single-sourcing, standards based solution. But I’m worried that Flare is too immature and won’t allow me to produce professional PDF manuals the way ATCS can… but then there’s Blaze… immature, sure, but maybe I don’t need MUCH for my PDF output… big printed manuals are dinosaurs.

But my real problem? Having never used either of these programs or anything like them, I can’t just download the demos and explore. My learning curve is going to be nice and steep! How I can I make a decision about this universe when my favorite editor is vi? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi)

I’d appreciate any advice you may have on how to make this decision intelligently, given my details. I’ve been reading all the reviews and comparisons between the products I can find, but generally they spend a lot of time on features that I probably don’t need or legacy support for a legacy unrelated to my position.

If you were starting from scratch, had a love for open-source, bare-bones style coding and layout, yet you needed advanced layout tools, and needed to produce manuals, help files, Web-based help documents, and videos, how would you go about investigating the options? And are there KEY factors that would inform your decision?

That would be funny if it worked better in Flare than in RoboHelp, as I suspect it might.

Here’s the text:

“1. Open up a Microsoft Windows Explorer session and locate the .htm(l) files for importing into the project.
2. Select and copy the .htm(l) files.
3. In Flare, find the folder that would like to add the .htm(l) files too. Right-click on the folder and select “Open Folder in Windows”.
4. Paste the .htm(l) files into the folder that opens.
5. View the converted XML files in the Content Explorer within the MadCap Flare user interface.
6. Double-click on the .htm(l) file and the HTML -> XHTML Wizard dialog will appear.
7. Click the Yes button to proceed with the conversion.

Note: You will need to open up all of the .htm(l) files that were copied to be converted into the XHTML format using the HTML -> XHTML Wizard.”

My summary: You can just drag the Captivate output files into your Flare project. Then double-click the htm files, convert them. Then just link to them like any other topic. They open and display fine.

Yeah, the garbage truck was just starting to slam around in the back alley. It was so loud Mike and I had to raise our voices to be heard so we started laughing about it.

I did work for eHelp five years ago for something like a year and a half after they had changed offices. I was hoping to work for them while they were in La Jolla, but they gave me my own office once they had the increased space so it was a cool tradeoff.

I’m currently working on the http://www.vets2vines.com project located up near wine country in Northern California. I’ve been trying to finish up this energy efficient building way behind the schedule. Luckily it’s nearly complete, and eventually that building will be the office from which to do the rest of the operations. Overall Vets2Vines is kind of a big project and may take a couple more years to finish!

Loving WordPress. Just switched over from Adobe Contribute to Windows Live Writer two days ago, very impressed with how MSFT did Writer.

Thanks for the article on my podcast, by the way! Mike really did open up. Not that he’s an introvert or anything, and it was pretty cool to catch up with him for the first time in a few years.