---
title: "Outside the tech comm tool bubble, there is a wide, wide world"
date: 2014-10-09
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2014/10/09/outside-the-tech-comm-tool-bubble-there-is-a-wide-wide-world/
---
# Outside the tech comm tool bubble, there is a wide, wide world
If you hang out in tech comm circles, attend STC meetings and technical writing conferences, and interact on tech writer blogs and forums, you might think the general tool options for professional technical writing goes something like this: You can use a help authoring tool, such as Madcap Flare, Framemaker, or Author-it. You can also structure your content in DITA, using an editor such as OxygenXML. If you're a big corporation, you maybe publish your content on a CMS of some kind, like SDL or Ixiasoft. If you're in a highly collaborative environment, you might use a wiki such as Confluence or Mediawiki. If you're simply unlucky, you may be stuck with Microsoft Word. And that's about it. Of course there are more tool options, but they all do more or less similar things.

In contrast, if you step outside the tech comm tool bubble and interact in API documentation circles, the tool conversation is much different.

Note that when I say API documentation, I mean two things: reference documentation about the classes, functions, methods, etc. for the API. And accompanying developer guides that include getting started information, code samples, and other tutorials on how to actually use the API.

You can generate API *reference* documentation from comments that developers write in the source code using documentation generators. Documentation generators often work for a specific language. For example, [Javadoc](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/index-jsp-135444.html) is a documentation generator for Java. [pydoc](https://docs.python.org/2/library/pydoc.html) is a documentation generator for Python. [VSdocman](http://www.helixoft.com/vsdocman/overview.html) is a documentation generator for C#. [Doxygen](http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/) is a documentation generator for numerous languages, including C++, Java, C#, and more.

Wikipedia has a [comprehensive list of documentation generators](). Anita Andrews also compiled a good list of documentation generators in her article "[What tools do you use to produce API documentation?]()" Doxygen also has a list of [alternative doc tools]().

If you look through documentation generators, it seems that most of them stopped development a number of years ago. For example, I was excited to find [Doc-o-Matic]() because it not only seems to handle several languages but also accepts additional files outside of the program source files. Unfortunately, it seems Doc-o-Matic is largely abandoned, their last update occurring in 2009. I emailed the company twice asking if the software is currently being worked on, but I never received a response.

Today the most common documentation generators seem to be Doxygen, Javadoc, and Sphinx. If you do a search on [indeed.com](http://www.indeed.com/) for these tools, the results give you a good idea of what people actually use. Many of the keyword results are listed in jobs for engineers rather than technical writers. That's because these are the tech writing tools used by developers. If you ask a developer what DITA or Madcap Flare is, he or she will give you a blank look.