Super MadCap quite fantastic; are other tools atrocious?

With the imminent release of DITA support in MadCap Flare, will competing Help authoring tools (HATS) suddenly seem inadequate to the task of technical writing? Where does this leave Adobe’s RoboHelp? I suspect it will be difficult technically and commercially (Adobe also owns FrameMaker) for Adobe to add DITA support into RoboHelp. If writers are… Read more »

Give me your technical writers yearning to breathe free

We’ve two clients, one in France and the other in Denmark, willing to hire US American and Canadian technical writers who have the skills they need. Salaries are up to $150,000 pa. There are approximately 1,500,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent,according to Wikipedia, so this could be a homecoming of sorts. See the Vacancies… Read more »

Who says documentation doesn’t matter?

From Ars Technica Judge: Microsoft documentation unfit for US consumption By John Timmer | Published: September 25, 2008 – 07:50PM CT Microsoft may have made a big push to settle many of the antitrust actions facing it around the globe, but those efforts have run up against a major stumbling block: the company’s inability to… Read more »

User Assistance – You’ve come a long way baby?

The MgmtSIG digest pointed me towards the Bitsavers’ Software Archive (http://www.bitsavers.org/), which stores documentation and software for minicomputers and mainframes from the 1950s -1980s. It shows how far user assistance has come, particularly in terms of graphic design. However, there are still areas where we could learn from the past. The digest referenced MiTTS (Minimalist… Read more »