Technical Writing Software epiDocX:Technical, Help document or Tutorials in few clicks!

Posted by Abbas ||

September 23, 2008 ||

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Technical writing services are most commonly used by individual software developers or small sized companies. Another task that comes closest to technical writing is the online tutorials which bloggers or site owners develop for their readers.

Creating help files for software is one of the most important parts of the technical documentation. Individual software developers prefer coding than creating documentation but not all developers can afford to outsource their work.

We will look at one of the software’s which creates Help documentation or Tutorials by following your actions on the computer screen or a specific application. The software is capable of creating documentation on formats such as PDF, DOC, HTML, XML & PPT.

Software is called epiDOCX, from Epiance, which tracks your activities and creates documentation automatically. This documentation includes screenshots and highlights clicks and areas which are of importance. It automatically extracts the window titles, captions and option names and includes it in the documentation.

The whole process of creating a tutorial or a technical document of a software involves 3 steps, 1) Capture, 2) Review, 3) Edit & Publish

Capture:

This option lets you choose what you want to capture and name the project. As shown in the image below you can choose from 3 options for capturing your activities.

capture screen.gif

Once you select from the above options just name your project and click on the start button to start recording the activities on the screen and create the documentation.

You can also choose to edit and modify your settings by clicking on “setting” on the same screen. One of the good features this software offers is that it adds “Callout’s” or “Sticky Notes” automatically.

Review:

Task Reviewer supports three views – Images, Properties and Right to left reading order.

Images:
The Images View displays the steps and its associated images. This view lets you mask step images.

Properties:
The Properties View displays various properties of the steps in a grid. The white colored cells indicate that the value of the cell is editable and a grey colored cell indicates that it is not editable.

Right to left reading order:
Text in this view is shown in the right to left format

Edit and Publish:

This is last of the 3 steps involved in creating a technical document.
Some of the editing tasks you can perform here are:

reorganize the process task steps using Cut, Copy, Paste, Insert, and Delete commands
change the description of the process task steps
change the properties of the process task steps
edit the images associated with the process task steps
change the sentence structure and sentence format of the step descriptions
format text
apply filter to process steps
change the callout and sticky note settings
change the properties of an epiDOCX task

Some of the tasks you can perform before publishing the document are:

Selecting the final format (DOC, PDF, PPT, HTML, XML)
Choose from several templates
Publishing document topics
Output location of the technical document.

It also offers a few options in "Advanced Settings" as shown in the image below.

I have created a test tutorial document or a technical document which shows how to check memory usage of Google Chrome Browser and other browsers and how to modify the default dowonload location in Google Chrome Browser. Click here to download and see the example documents.

The only thing I did not like about this software was that it embeds a watermark right in the middle of each of the document created using a trial version. Trial version anyway works only for 7 days.

Overall a very good software which can save a few hundred dollars and a lot of time in creating help files and writing technical documents.