> They seem to use paid writing suites quite a lot. MadCap Flare is a name you hear often. TW teams writing in B2C contexts often use these suites too.

I didn't know these suites existed. What other ones are popular, and what's their selling point?

MadCap is the big one I hear about, then maybe FrameMaker at a distant second and plain old Microsoft Word. As a software technical writer who loves docs-as-code I don't know how the writers in manufacturing and aviation and whatnot put up with those tools...

MadCap Flare was an awesome product. It grew out of the old BlueSky "RoboHelp" suite (which was also awesome) and could be used to output to many different formats (online help, web help, print docs, confluence). It's been a while, but I think you could even use FrameMaker to author and still use Flare to transform output to all its supported formats.

It's been a long time since I immersed myself in this world, so apologies if my memory is less than perfect.

BTW: If you want to connect, there's a professional society for the discipline: Society for Technical Communication (STC).

https://www.stc.org

They have local chapters in many geographies. Their annual conference is usually well attended and covers topics related to technical writing from Help Authoring to Content Strategy to Content Marketing to Agile.

There's a whole niche: DITA CCMS like Tridion or Ixiasoft. Or more pragmatic European CCMS solutions such as SCHEMA ST4, Cosima, TIM-RS or Paligo.

Our in-house translators use Trados

https://www.trados.com/

Ah, Trados.

I love how on their homepage there's a 1m20s video that shows not a single shot of the godawful UI.

Def. give a look at DITA...Darwin Information Typing Architecture is not a tool so much as an approach/framework that other products can support. Many modern tooling supports some of the DITA concepts, even if they aren't officially DITA tools.

On the other end, much of documentation has moved into the Wiki space. For a long time, Confluence was making some serious inroads there.

Most professional tooling these days also emphasizes content reuse, and sometimes (if you are lucky) separating content from presentation.

Opinions come from experience: I spent many years in tech writing at both fortune 50's and startups, but have since moved on to other disciplines I enjoy more.

There's more about the quality features at https://www.jetbrains.com/help/writerside/inspectopedia.html and a little at https://www.jetbrains.com/help/writerside/documentation-qual....

For that they would need to support DITA and Docbook, which while not fancy around here, I imagine they are pretty much what most of those markets still use.

Markdown for those markets just won't do it.

Tooling like Oxygen XML still seems to be quite common.

The fact they mention XML a few times on the page prompted that idea. But on closer read it seems that they're using XML for some narrow needs and do not plan on general XML-heavy workflows.

> wonder if JetBrains is going for the professional technical writer (TW) market outside of software development. Think aviation, military, manufacturing, etc

Is there a market?

From my experience, professional writers are just low paid freelancers.

Using an free editor, to collect data into AI, to replace them, seems like best business plan!

> from my experience, professional writers are just low paid freelancers

It tends to depend on the company...and what the writers are building, and of course, what the product is. Some products do not lend themselves well to a freelance approach, as the domain and product specific knowledge is quite high. Other products have very specific regulatory compliance obligations that also do not lend themselves readily to freelancing (unless you are talking about long term contractors with 2+ year commitments, etc....

Enjoy your airplane flights where all the pilot manuals and checklists are written by AI

More so just a question for you, but how does one get into or at least improve their technical writing as a software engineer? Any feedback? I've found met with questions from customers that my writing wasn't able to make clear and that's something I'd like to work on.

Review every written piece against the goal of the writing. What is the purpose of a document in terms of the reader. What should a reader take away from a paragraph or a sentence.

Iterate until this becomes second nature.

Hi, I have two suggestions.

First, I sense that you should keep work on improving your mastery of English grammar. I have a few resources for that:

* Technical Writing One by Google [1] is a pretty good self-study course for practicing the fundamentals of writing mechanics.

* Find some kind of program that forces you to write and get feedback on your writing. English classes at community colleges, for example. There are probably a lot of online resources, too. The best way to improve your writing is to practice and get feedback; just like the best way to learn about programming is to create programs.

* A Writer's Reference [2] is a canonical reference text for looking up grammar rules.

I know this is boring work but it really is the foundation of communicating clearly.

After you've got those fundamentals down, you'll want to learn about the processes that technical writers follow to figure out what docs customers really need. Docs For Developers [3] is a pretty solid overview of the process that many TWs follow.

[1] https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Reference-Diana-Hacker/dp/131...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Docs-Developers-Engineers-Technical-W...