You can use any text editors to write technical documents such as MS word or even notepad. However, the more flexibility you have in writing your documents, the higher risk ending up with document inconsistency among different writers across the organization. To deliver a professional image to customers, all technology companies want to present their documents to their customers both in the same voice (writing style) and in the same format. That's why normally most companies choose to use professional authoring tools. With these tools, content can be separated from format so that writers can focus on creating the content. All the rest will be taken care by the "style sheets" corresponding to different types of deliverables (such as on-screen and printing). This is also to save costs as these tools normally support single-sourcing documentation strategy.
You have many choices and here are some popular ones:
- Adobe Technical Communication Suite (including Frame Maker, Robo Help, etc.)
- Atlassian Confluence (wiki based documentation)
- easyDITA
- And more....
As a technical writer, you may also need to use other applications, such as the following.
Screen Capture:
Screen Recording & Video Editing:
Flowchart:
Image Editing:
Text Editing:
Hardcopy Design:
Style Checker:
Version Control and Content Managment:
See the Content Management System (CMS) section.
This is what behind the tools. Schema or DTD defines the structure of the documents by providing a set of structured tags to indicate different document elements and their relationships. With these pre-defined tags, rendering tools can later convert the documents to the final deliverables using the style sheets corresponding to the output mediums.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML data model for authoring introduced by IBM in 2001. Now it is a standard maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita
DocBook is a schema maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS. It is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software.
LaTex is a documentation preparation system. It is a standard for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is available as free software.
S1000D is an international standard for procuring and producing technical documentation. This standard was initially developed for aircraft technical documentation. Now it has been extended to support land, sea, and commercial systems or equipments. S1000D is a suite of information that includes a 2,762-page specification (Issue 4.0), a set of XML schemas, sample XML instances, and additional supporting documentation.
www.s1000d.netLightweight markup languages such as Markdown, Textile, and reStructuredText are most used for web-based publishing like webblog or wiki, where require the easy-to-enter and easy-to-read raw format with simple syntax. They can be exported to other common formats such as HTML, XHTML, Docbook, PDF, and so on.
It's common that your company may use its own the DTD/schema instead of the standard set above. The tailored DTD may better suit your company's documentation needs.