---
title: "Help Authoring Tool Comparison from Sarah Maddox"
date: 2010-06-09
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> For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://idratherbewriting.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of all pages are available by appending .md to any page URL.

# Help Authoring Tool Comparison from Sarah Maddox

Even though I dismissed the relevance of help authoring tools [in my last post](https://idratherbewriting.com/2010/06/03/from-help-authoring-tools-to-web-tools-especially-wikis-organizing-content-12/), I thought this [writeup by Sarah Maddox on help authoring tools](http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/aodc-day-3-help-authoring-tool-comparison/) from a presentation by Matthew Ellison at a tech comm conference in Australia was worthwhile and helpful. Sarah paraphrases Matthew:

> HATs hide the complexity and allow you to concentrate on the content. You don't need to worry about coding and scripting, conditional tags and other mechanics under the hood.
>
> HATs produce some very nice output, such as browser-based help (WebHelp), PDF and many other types. On the whole, HATs produce the tri-pane output format of online help. If that's what you need, they make it very easy to do.
>
> They provide help-specific features such as context sensitivity, indexing, dropdowns and related topics.
>
> You can also use HATs for single sourcing.
>
> In summary, HATs cater to our specific needs as technical writers.