bloginfo: March 2013

This post details about what is technical writing and what does technical writers do.

TECHNICAL WRITING

Technical Writing is a form of communication intended to help the users/audiences to understand technical stuff in a much easier way. Technical writing do involve creativity. The creative skill should be implemented in such a way that it should keep the reader engaging, who tries to learn the technical method of installing or working of the most complex software.

Technical writers act as bridge between the developers, who develop the software and the client, who buys to work on that software. They communicate about the software and its working through documentations to the client. The job nature of technical writer would be gathering of information from different resources and coordinate with different departments to acquire the correct data.

There are different types of software documents that a technical writer has to create. They are

User Manuals
Reports
Release Notes
Administrator Manual
Requirement Specifications
Administrator Manuals
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Project Setup Documents
Road Map Documents
Training Documents
How-to-Videos
Minutes of Meeting
On-line Help Files
Process Documents

Now lets see that what are the qualifications required to become a technical writer. The job nature of a technical writer completely involves communication. Writing is a form of communication. So, anybody who has some knowledge about technical stuffs and a lot of interest towards writing can become a technical writer. In India, even content writers can also become technical writers if they have sound knowledge about computers.

Technical documentations are meant to deliver a process/work flow to an user in the simplest way. So, the content of the technical document should be written in simple English.Think yourself as the end user, while you write a technical document in order to provide better clarity and understanding.

Some tips to write in a better way are as follows.

Give the content precise and neat. Do not give the document in a confusing way by messing the process flow.

Presentation is a vital factor for a technical document. The way you present the document, will speak about your professionalism which is based on the usage of Standard formatting and design styles.

Nowadays every software product gets updated frequently to higher versions. Thus, nearly 50% of the documents would be of rework where you need to add the content about the enhancements in the product. In this case, you need to analyze the existing information and create the document based on the available content.

Communication skills both written and verbal is vital for a technical writer. The job nature of the technical writer is to gather information from different sources such as Project Manager, Developer, Tester and prepare the document with correct information within a short span of time. In such cases, your communication skill plays a major role, since you need to interact with many people to create the document accurately in a desirable way.

Everyone has the tendency to learn things easily through visual media rather than reading paragraphs. Try to deliver concepts graphically which will enable you to convey in a more effective manner.

Review is the most important part of documentation. Reviewing helps you to produce a document with correct information and without any flaws. More you review, better would be your documentation.

Adobe Robohelp is a Help Authoring Tool (HAT). It is used to create help file for desktop or web-based applications. You can author your own content, track and manage project file and build up navigation such as links, table of contents, indexes and browser sequences.

IMPORTING A WORD DOCUMENT TO ROBOHELP:

You can import a word document to robohelp and this can be converted to chm and HTML formats. This section will illustrate the step by step procedure for importing a word document to robohelp.

Click on “File” menu, select “New” option and select “Project” to create a new project as shown below.

The following window appears.

In the “New” tab select “Blank Project”. Click on “Import” tab.

Select the word document to be imported.

As soon as the file is selected, the “Content Settings” dialog box appears as shown below.

Check the following options; Convert Table of Contents, Convert Index and Convert Glossary; this will enable you to convert the word document content settings exactly to robohelp.

Click on “Next” button and the following window appears.

Click on “Edit” button to edit the conversion settings for the word document.

The “Conversion Settings” screen appears as shown below.

Click on “Paragraph” option. You will find the document headings that you had used in word document.

The heading names appears as “Heading 1”, “Heading 2” and “Heading 3”.

Select the heading and the page appears as shown below.

Select the “Pagination” option. This will create a separate new page/link for each “Heading 1”. Similarly assign pagination for the other two headings.

Click on “Other Settings” option and the window appears as shown below.

Check the options “Convert Header” and “Convert Footer” to convert the header and footer settings of word to robohelp.

Click on “OK” button.

Then click on “Finish” button.

The settings chosen by you will get processed and the file getting imported appears in a pop up window as shown below.

Click on “Close” button. Now the word document contents are available in robohelp. In the “Project Manager” pod, you can view your project file under the HTML files folder. Click on the folder to view file content.