RE: What Program Do You Use for Software Documentation?

["Mike Hamilton" <mhamilton -at- madcapsoftware -dot- com>]

> I do take exception to including Flare, RoboHelp, etc. as single
> source tools.

I won't speak to the other tools, but you should really sit in on one of
my public Flare demos. Most tools in the industry were created before
single-sourcing was common and have had to "back in" to those
capabilities where possible. On the other hand, when we designed Flare
it was with all of our years of experience in this industry and the
opportunity to use the absolute latest in technology and built an
architecture with single-source and multi-channel publishing at its
core. Flare has content re-use from the character level to the topic or
even file level, support for externally referenced content, full
variable support, the most powerful cross-reference model available, and
the list goes on. 

> They normally require some other tool to produce the
> text, and often the formatting before transforming it.

Not true at all. Flare has an amazing visual XML editor built in and
many customers never leave the Flare IDE for all of their authoring and
style sheet creation. Flare also includes the controls necessary to
modify and customize our publishing transforms without the need to dig
in to a code level.

If you would like to sit in on a demo or just to chat about the state of
tools sometime then feel free to drop me a line off list. I don't mean
this post as any kind of rebuff, simply trying to correct some
misconceptions.

Cheers,

Mike Hamilton
V.P. Product Management
MadCap Software



> -----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+mhamilton=madcapsoftware -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+mhamilton=madcapsoftware -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-
> l.com] On Behalf Of quills -at- airmail -dot- net
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 4:05 PM
> To: Paul Weir; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: RE: What Program Do You Use for Software Documentation?
> 
> I do take exception to including Flare, RoboHelp, etc. as single
> source tools. They normally require some other tool to produce the
> text, and often the formatting before transforming it. As such they
> are transformers and are only marginally single source tools. They
> are more accurately a multiple plath transforming tool.
> 
> Scott
> 
> At 3:42 PM -0700 10/22/08, Leonard C. Porrello wrote:
> >A hammer is a fine tool for smashing your thumb, but it stinks for
> >authoring documents that call for sophisticated single sourcing and
> >reuse. Similarly, Word is a great tool for some ends. So is
> FrameMaker.
> >However, neither Word nor FrameMaker facilitate sophisticated single
> >sourcing or reuse ("snippets"). If you don't need those things,
> >fantastic. Word or FrameMaker may be just the ticket; if you do,
> you'll
> >want to avoid both Word and FrameMaker and look to H&M, Flare,
> RoboHelp
> >or AuthorIt.
> >
> >Leonard
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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