Technical communication tools
Encyclopedia
Technical communicators use a variety of tools to create usable information. Often referred to as a "tool set", there is no defined list of tools that are used by all technical writers. However, broad categories of tools are used by most technical writers and communicators.
Many tools have independent forums that provide varying levels of support or assistance.
by Adobe Systems
, and Word
by Microsoft
.
LibreOffice Writer
is the freely available Open Source alternative that works on most popular operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) and is part of the LibreOffice
suite of programs.
AbiWord
is also Open Source and is a very fast and light alternative word processor.
, and GIMP
.
For creating vector graphics Inkscape
provides more functionality and control than the other programs.
Common text editors are Notepad by Microsoft
, the Open Source Notepad++
and cross-platform editors such as vim
or Emacs
.
TextEdit
is included in the utilities suite of Mac OS X. Other text editors used for the Macintosh platform are BBEdit
, which is a paid-product, and its lighter weight freeware
sibling, TextWrangler
, both from Bare Bones Software
.
Most users of Linux or Unix machines come down on one side of the Emacs vs. vi debate as to their favourite choice of text editor.
For Haiku
machines the default Pe
(short for Programmers editor) is simple and powerful and usually provides all the necessary functionality in one program, thus fitting with the Haiku philosophy.
s can save information as HTML, but the quality of HTML output is often not to W3C standards. The most common HTML editors are HTML-Kit
, Homesite/Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive
, and Namo
.
Documents written with DocBook
can be made to output to standards compliant XHTML.
s in the XML
format. XML content can be edited as plain text
, while some XML editors look like word processor
s and provide WYSIWYG
editing of structured content. The most commonly used XML editors are Arbortext, Oxygen
, Syntext Serna
, XMLmind, and XMetaL
.
The most common format for writing technical documentation is using the DocBook
XML system. This is a very simple yet powerful language which can be used to create a wide variety of popular formats PDF, HTML, CHM, ePub, JavaDoc, etc., and is used by O'Reilly Media
for some of their popular computing textbooks.
More generally though in recent years there has been a move away from CHM files towards XML based help systems or XHTML WebHelp type layouts which can be displayed in any standards compliant web browser.
pages, and internet forum
s or discussion boards. The forums provide information on technical communication standards and job prospects, as well as several other topics.
For more information on available tools refer to the Technical communication tools category.
Many tools have independent forums that provide varying levels of support or assistance.
Word processors
There are a variety of word processors available, each with advantages and disadvantages. The most common are FramemakerFrameMaker
Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor for the production and manipulation of large structured documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems. Although FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years, it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.- Overview :FrameMaker has more...
by Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
, and Word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
.
LibreOffice Writer
LibreOffice Writer
LibreOffice Writer is the open-source word processor component of the LibreOffice software package and is a fork of OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect, with some of their features....
is the freely available Open Source alternative that works on most popular operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) and is part of the LibreOffice
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite developed by The Document Foundation as a fork of OpenOffice.org. It is largely compatible with other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, and available on a variety of platforms...
suite of programs.
AbiWord
AbiWord
AbiWord is a free and open source software word processor. It was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first part of a proposed AbiSuite. Development stopped when SourceGear changed their focus to Internet appliances. AbiWord was adopted by some open source developers and AbiWord...
is also Open Source and is a very fast and light alternative word processor.
E-Learning programs
The latest trend in online education is to connect tutors and students, from across the world, with interactive software. authorLIVE is one such tutoring environment to provide solutions for the challenges of distance learning. Other options include IBIS, Blackboard, and WebCT.Graphics programs
There is an old cliché: "A picture is worth a thousand words". This holds true for technical communication. Many document sets contain large numbers of screen captures, black-box diagrams, and other explanatory pictures to assist the reader in understanding a concept or action. The most commonly used programs are industry leader Corel Photo XI, Photoshop by Adobe SystemsAdobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
, and GIMP
GIMP
GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.In addition to detailed image retouching and...
.
For creating vector graphics Inkscape
Inkscape
Inkscape is a free software vector graphics editor, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Its goal is to implement full support for the Scalable Vector Graphics 1.1 standard....
provides more functionality and control than the other programs.
Desktop publishing software
Not all projects require a high level of presentation quality, especially projects designed for a company's internal use only. When a project is to be presented to external audiences, presentation becomes more important. Desktop publishing software can provide a document set with a higher quality presentation than a word processor.- For documents requiring a complex or flexible layout, or with strict typography demands, the two most common packages are QuarkXpressQuarkXPressQuarkXPress is a computer application for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG environment. It runs on Mac OS X and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc...
and InDesign. - For unstructured long document publishing, such as technical manuals, FramemakerFrameMakerAdobe FrameMaker is a document processor for the production and manipulation of large structured documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems. Although FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years, it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.- Overview :FrameMaker has more...
and InterleafInterleafFounded in 1981, Interleaf was a company that created software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG output at near-typeset quality...
are the most common choices. - The open source ScribusScribusScribus is a desktop publishing application, released under the GNU General Public License as free software. It is based on the free Qt toolkit, therefore native versions are available for Linux, Unix-like operating systems, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and OS/2...
desktop publishing software provides all the functionality of the commercial options and works both on Linux and Windows systems.
Text editors
Lightweight text editors are very useful tools. While many word processors can be used to edit text, specialised text editors generally have features for handling text that word processors don't have. Additionally, files saved from a word processing program will often have added data and thus will not work if the file is to be loaded into an external program for processing.Common text editors are Notepad by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, the Open Source Notepad++
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a text editor and source code editor for Windows. One advantage of Notepad++ over the built-in Windows text editor, Notepad, is tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files.Notepad++ is distributed as free software...
and cross-platform editors such as vim
Vim (text editor)
Vim is a text editor written by Bram Moolenaar and first released publicly in 1991. Based on the vi editor common to Unix-like systems, Vim is designed for use both from a command line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface...
or Emacs
Emacs
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
.
TextEdit
TextEdit
TextEdit is a simple, open source word processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. It is now distributed with Mac OS X since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT, and available as a GNUstep application for other Unix-compatible operating systems such as Linux...
is included in the utilities suite of Mac OS X. Other text editors used for the Macintosh platform are BBEdit
BBEdit
BBEdit is a proprietary text editor made by Bare Bones Software. It was originally developed for Macintosh System Software 6 and is now available for Mac OS X.BBEdit is marketed under the trademark slogan, "It doesn't suck."-History:...
, which is a paid-product, and its lighter weight freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
sibling, TextWrangler
TextWrangler
TextWrangler is a text editor for Mac OS X from Bare Bones Software. It was originally a commercial product, but has become the freeware alternative to their flagship editor, BBEdit, and the successor to their previous freeware editor, BBEdit Lite.Like BBEdit, TextWrangler is not a word processor...
, both from Bare Bones Software
Bare Bones Software
Bare Bones Software is a Bedford, Massachusetts, USA software company developing software tools for the Apple Macintosh platform. The company is best known for its BBEdit text editor, marketed under the registered trademark "It doesn't suck," and has been mentioned as a "Top-Tier Mac developer" by...
.
Most users of Linux or Unix machines come down on one side of the Emacs vs. vi debate as to their favourite choice of text editor.
For Haiku
Haiku (operating system)
Haiku is a free and open source operating system compatible with BeOS. Its development began in 2001, and the operating system became self-hosting in 2008, with the first alpha release in September 2009, the second in May 2010 and the third in June 2011....
machines the default Pe
Pe (text editor)
Pe, short for Programmer’s Editor, is an open source text editor for the Be Operating System . It is targeted towards source-code editing, and features syntax highlighting for a large number of programming languages...
(short for Programmers editor) is simple and powerful and usually provides all the necessary functionality in one program, thus fitting with the Haiku philosophy.
HTML editors
Any text editor can be used as an HTML editor, but specialised HTML editors generally include features for manipulating HTML that text editors don't include. Many word processorWord processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s can save information as HTML, but the quality of HTML output is often not to W3C standards. The most common HTML editors are HTML-Kit
HTML-Kit
HTML-Kit is an HTML editor for Microsoft Windows made by .The application is a full-featured HTML editor designed to edit, format, validate, preview and publish web pages in HTML, XHTML and XML -languages....
, Homesite/Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive
Adobe GoLive
Adobe GoLive was a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site management application from Adobe Systems. It replaced Adobe PageMill as Adobe's primary HTML editor and was itself discontinued in favour of Dreamweaver...
, and Namo
Namo
Namo can refer to:*Namo, a Sanskrit term used mostly in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism to express honor to God or a Great person; literally means "Homage".*Namo WebEditor, a famous WYSIWYG Webpage editor manufactured in Korea...
.
Documents written with DocBook
DocBook
DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation....
can be made to output to standards compliant XHTML.
XML editors
XML editors are applied for creating structured documentStructured document
A structured document is an electronic document where some method of embedded coding, such as markup, is used to give the whole, and parts, of the document various structural meanings according to a schema...
s in the XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
format. XML content can be edited as plain text
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....
, while some XML editors look like word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s and provide WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
editing of structured content. The most commonly used XML editors are Arbortext, Oxygen
Oxygen XML Editor
The Oxygen XML Editor is a multi-platform XML editor, XSLT/XQuery debugger and profiler with Unicode support. It is a Java application, so it can run in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It also has a version that can run as an Eclipse plugin.- XML editing features :Oxygen XML offers a number of...
, Syntext Serna
Syntext Serna
Syntext Serna is a WYSIWYG XML editor from Syntext, Inc. Syntext Serna works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC.- XML editing features :...
, XMLmind, and XMetaL
XMetaL
XMetaL, or XMetaL Author, is a software application used for creating and editing documents in XML and SGML. It has some features common to word processors, but is a native XML editor that can be configured to work with various standard and custom DTDs and XML Schema...
.
The most common format for writing technical documentation is using the DocBook
DocBook
DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation....
XML system. This is a very simple yet powerful language which can be used to create a wide variety of popular formats PDF, HTML, CHM, ePub, JavaDoc, etc., and is used by O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...
for some of their popular computing textbooks.
Specialized Tools for Generating Help files
Although various outputs have been historically popular, the overall trend in help documentation output format is towards online help. There are many software packages designed for producing Microsoft CHM help files:More generally though in recent years there has been a move away from CHM files towards XML based help systems or XHTML WebHelp type layouts which can be displayed in any standards compliant web browser.
Online forums
Technical communicators often seek the advice and recommendations of their peers through online forums. These can include, but are not limited to, email lists, wikiWiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
pages, and internet forum
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
s or discussion boards. The forums provide information on technical communication standards and job prospects, as well as several other topics.
Other useful tools
There are many other tools that technical communicators find useful. Dictionaries are one of the most useful tools any writer can have. A list of online dictionaries is available.For more information on available tools refer to the Technical communication tools category.