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A comment on Writerside – a new technical writing environment from JetBrains. Parent comment

Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by pbowyer on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @02:41AM (#37995491)
> 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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by spondylosaurus on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @02:45AM (#37995517)
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...
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Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by mjoneill on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @10:08AM (#37999369)
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.

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Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by mjoneill on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @10:15AM (#37999445)
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.

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Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by zapperdulchen on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @03:01AM (#37995618)
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.
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Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by ReleaseCandidat on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @03:13AM (#37995691)
Our in-house translators use Trados

https://www.trados.com/

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Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by petepete on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @09:17AM (#37998778)
Ah, Trados.

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

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Re:Writerside – a new technical writing environment from Jet... by mjoneill on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @10:02AM (#37999313)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]