Technical writing is a very specific term. It doesn’t simply mean writing technical content, as most people outside the niche assume. It’s a more specific term, which refers to the technical communicationin fields like computer software and hardware, aeronautics, chemistry, robotics, engineering, and other technical fields.
In its simple explanation, it means “conveying complex information in a simple form.” It involves much more than content writing.
We can illustrate technical writing with a single word: manuals.
Writing such content requires specific skills. Not everyone has them, but we can surely work on them, right? According to Emily Sanders, a technical writer for SuperiorPapers, there’s one thing that can make you better at this: “The right software tools.
There are great tools that enhance and simplify the process of technical writing. Unfortunately, not all writers know how to choose and use the best available tools.”
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Technical Writing: Master Your Writing Career – Technical Writing: How to Become a Profitable, Reliable, and Successful Technical Writer
We’ll try to make the choice easier for you. We’ll list the best software tools for technical writing, so you can start using the ones you need.
ClickHelp is an excellent browser-based, 100% cloud, flexible, and everyone’s favorite. The online and printed documentation is now produced rapidly only via ClickHelp. Plus, it can also produce PDF docs, context help, policies, and procedures with ease.
Their mission is to save the time of all software companies when they create their user manuals.
Software developers and technicians collaborate with a single documentation platform to get more work and benefit in less time. This has now become very important in the market as the market is rising on a great extent.
They have maintained a better user experience by providing so many techniques for the ease of the customer. Their techniques let the user drive more by improving their rates and customer retention by better user experience. Moreover, they provide you with the ease to access online documentation, in product context help, tutorials and product tours.
Their technical writing blogs include Convert CHM to Web Help, Top 7 Online Help Authoring Tools, and 11 Skills of a Good Technical Writer.
Furthermore, the ClickHelp offers Custom Domain Name, Daily Backups, Single Sign-On, Password-Protected Manuals, Mobile & Tablet Support, and the list goes on with 200+ features.
They guarantee full trust of the user as they provide full system uptime transparency which is automatically monitored from not just one but many authenticated locations.
In addition, they use high-quality hosting facilities from Germany, the United States and, Australia. There is always supervision of cameras and 24 hours monitors, so one can easily trust them with all their data.
If you want to write your content, publish them and deliver what’s on your mind in almost no time, then Help+Manual is the best source one can use. It works with Webhelp, Windows Help, PDF Manuals, and eBooks.
It is a very powerful and effective tool that is easy to use as a word processor where the learning curve is short. Like vise Word, Help+Manual is simple to use and gives you full command in WYSIWYG XML editor.
You don’t need any long training classes to learn it because Help+Manual has the easiest tools that one can easily learn on his own. Although, they do provide training classes.
Help+Manual is a combination of powerful features and helps in the documentation of files with the full support of multimedia and complex modular projects.
It is always easy to publish documentation for desktop or mobile, iOS or Android, Windows help or PDF user manuals with Help+Manual. After the work is done, there’s no processing is required as it handles all the complications for you.
Help+Manual can give you the best of the experience of your life. Some of its powerful features include Teamwork, multi-user editing, Integrated version control, Translation management, Image tool, and project management.
Help+Manual helps in organizing content in single-source projects by providing Master/Child Modules,Conditional Tags, Multiple TOCs, Text Variables, Snippets, and Text Fragments.
Help+Manual is a great program, helping designer’s wish and delivers it in a sleek way. Furthermore, it’s a easy-to-use program.
A majority of people are using Help+Manual because of its brilliance.
This is a great choice of a tool for planning and project management. You can use it to generate various formats of documentation from a single platform. It gives you the features you need for completing manuals, help files, eBooks, and documentations. It’s really easy to use.
The best thing about HelpNDoc is that it integrates a table of contents editing, WYSIWYG topic editing, and keyword editing features in a single tool.
We’ve decided to list this option as well. It depends on what kind of TECH documentation you are about to prepare but you might realize that, you might be able to skip writing.
For example, if you are preparing guides for your team on how to use particular software, you might find recording your screen with guiding voice, way easier and also time-saving.
Screen Capture Tools
When you are preparing written documentation for your software, you definitely make some quick screenshots for your software and add simple edits (crop, add text, add arrows, etc.) within a few seconds, save and download it.
You might get by not even using another editing tool.
Having screenshot tools directly in your web browser might come very hand and can be a great timesaver.
This is a free editor that’s originally being used on Wikipedia. However, everyone can use it for displaying technical content in the form of help pages, how-to’s, and sales and marketing information.
The tool is pretty simple to use, and it gives you tutorials on how to edit a page.
If you’re creating policy & procedure manuals, online help, software and API documentation, knowledge bases, and other types of technical content, MadCap Flare is a good tool to use. It enables you to create, manage, and publish the content from a single platform. You use the tool not only for online content (mobile and desktop), but for print format as well.
The tool can do everything your clients need. Plus, MadCap Flare has an effective support team, so you won’t have a problem to figure out how to use it.
When it comes to editing images, which are absolutely needed in technical content, Adobe Photoshop is the tool most technical writers swear by. It’s a powerful image editing tool, which you’ll need for creating web pages, user interface designs, video graphics, and editing pictures for print.
There are alternatives, such as GIMP and Paint.net, but none of them is as powerful as Photoshop. Still, if you don’t need all features of Adobe Photoshop and you find the tool challenging to master, you may try one of the simpler alternatives first.
If you’re creating technical content for a global enterprise, you might have issues with terminology management. These clients have multiple versions of the same product name published, and translations of each target language version. This means you’ll face different treatments in capitalization, hyphenation, spacing, plural forms, and more. TermWeb is a terminology management solution, which will eliminate that confusion.
It’s a web-based model that will connect dispersed teams to the database, and it will help them make the transcultural communication more uniform, adaptable, clear, and effective.
This one is great to use during the editing process. It will “read” and score your content through a unique linguistics analysis system. Then, it will guide you through specific steps that help you improve its clarity and readability. Its guidelines are aimed at improvement of style, grammar, tone, and terminology. It’s more than what you get from your usual spelling and grammar checker.
Your entire team of writers can use it. Acrolinx does have a slight learning curve, especially when it comes to understanding the analytics on content quality trends and team performance. However, you’ll get used to it in no time.
When you’re creating how-to manuals for software, showing is better than explaining. You may guide the user through the functionalities of the tool by recording your screen as you use it. CamStudio is the right tool for that.
It can record all screen activity on your computer, audio included. You’ll get industry-standard AVI video files, which you can integrate in your technical content.
The online audience doesn’t like seeing technical content in the form of an endless, boring document that makes it difficult for them to find exactly what they need. When you’re presenting technical content online, you have to move away from the lengthy, static web help pages. Whatfix will help you do that.
This tool enables you to create captivating guides, presented by balloons, as the creators of the tool call the real-time interactive walkthrough elements. You don’t need any coding skills to start using the tool, although it does come with a learning curve. For the users of your technical content, however, it will make things much simpler.
No matter what kind of technical content you create and no matter how hard you’re trying to simplify the language, people will still have questions about it. That’s why you need to allow them to comment on the technical content you publish online.
Disqus is the best choice of an online commenting service. When you add it to a website or a community, the visitors can discuss the material, leave feedback, or ask questions and get assistance from the support team. When you create a Disqus account, you’ll get a HTML markup that’s ready to be inserted to the web pages. All you need to do is apply it, and you’ll get a commenting area under the content.
Your Turn
Technical content writing requires more than good writing skills. Fortunately, the right tools can make you better at what you do. If you’ve used any of the tools listed above, feel free to share your impressions. If you have other suggestions for tools that make a technical writer’s work more effective, we’d love to see your recommendations.
Author Bio: Joan Selby is a content marketer, former teacher and fancy shoe lover. A writer by day and reader by night. Find her on Twitterand Facebook.
We hope you’ve found some useful information about software or tools for your technical documentation. In case you would like to add some feedback or suggestions, please feel free to comment in the discussion section below. We highly appreciate any kind of feedback and ideas on how to improve our content.
Thanks for this. Can you recommend a tool that assists with editing? For example, if I have a figure in my document or manuscript, is there a software that let me know that I haven’t named or labeled it, or that will automatically name and label it for me?
Technical Writing: Master Your Writing Career – Technical Writing: How to Become a Profitable, Reliable, and Successful Technical Writer
We’ll try to make the choice easier for you. We’ll list the best software tools for technical writing, so you can start using the ones you need.
Great list, I haven’t even heard of these tools.
Good to know!
I recently had a good experience with another online documentation tool – ClickHelp. They also have a useful technical writing blog on their website.
Cool. Thanks for the tip, we will include it in upcoming update.
Thanks for this. Can you recommend a tool that assists with editing? For example, if I have a figure in my document or manuscript, is there a software that let me know that I haven’t named or labeled it, or that will automatically name and label it for me?