Anybody knows a good tool to create manuals?

I am looking for a tool/application to create and distribute electronic
technical manuals.

It should have features like search based on "soft questions" ("how do I
change the component so-and-so?" etc.)

It must be possible to incorporate pictures and drawings from e.g.
SolidWorks.

The manual should be accessible on e.g. an intranet.

Any suggestions?

 

Definitely the best available.

...

 

To distribute your manuals print them to .PDF (.PDF seems to be a standard
for electronic manual distribution, that's my observation anyway. It works
well across platforms and AcrobatReader is free to all.) I think a utility
that comes with SW 2004 (BlueBeam?) will allow you to print them from other
apps I am not sure though. Otherwise Adobe PageMaker comes with this
capability. It is a great program if you have the time to learn it. ( I
hated it at first but it's grown on me)

Corey Scheich

 

Use Adobe Acrobat (PDF format). It's free and very popular...........

 

Hi John,

We use Mocrosoft Word & then output to PDF.

Word is actually a pretty good "container" to put most things into -
accepts most items as a visible object, including solidworks, acad,
jpg, whatever and has the ability to annotate over the object with
Word objects (lie callouts). Its searchable, has table & link
creation abilities, converts to html with ease (hence searcable), and
most of all not too expensive or hard to learn.

PDF works even better for stability and easy distribution, but a
source doc is needed to create the PDF (word for us).

For what it's worth - I like these two together because they are
stable, reliable, inexpensive and likely to be around in 10 years.
I'm sure there are better products and taken point by point, both of
these might easily be laughed at.

Regards,

SMA

 

Yeah, and then you can distribute your 25 megabyte Word document (check
your file size).

'Spork'

 

Hi Denny,

This is probably academic (possibly widely known), but still worth
mentioning.

If one finds the file size is objetionable (it is to me sometimes too)
then the files can be "linked" instead of "embedded". This keeps the
size down and to my knowledge does not hinder distribution.

The only drawback of the linked files is that they inveraible get lost
after a while through mis-management. Nothing hurts more than not
being able to edit. Unfortunately, you wither have mega-bloat or the
need to manage external files.

My favorite is when an image is inserted as an object instead of a
picture. Talk about mega-files, all for the same image.

I too have fallen in love with the PDF's ability to compress the heck
out of anything. We did a litle study here and found that it
compressed (cad) things down to about 10 to 20 percent of the original
size depending on the original content, dpi output etc (cad drawings -
SW & autocad, sometimes with images tacked onto the cad). This made
PDF a reasonable alternative to the SW viewer, especially to our
vendors.

In any case - take care.

SMA

 

Hi SMA

Yeah - I imagined this to be a reasonable solution - basically just taking
the existing word-written manuals and print them to .pdf.

Having thought about it now, I guess I am looking for the tool used for
"help" in MSWord itself.... here your can ask questions like "how do I
format a heading", and then relevant topics are suggested.

Does anybody know how that kind of help is made?

John

 

Hi John,

I think what we are talking about is a CHM file.

I know you need a compiler to make them, but which one to use, I woudl not know.

If you do a websearch on "CHM complier" this should reaveal many options.

Regards-

SMA

 

MS has a free compiler for CHM, but better idea is to use something like
Microsoft HTML Help Workshop for example, it does the whole job. These are
free, but there are much better commercial softwares available..mentioned
softwares aren't that great, just simple tools..

I made some CHM's about a year ago and used free/shareware program but I
can't remember it's name, it was used together with MS CHM compiler and it
worked well..I'll tell you if I found it.

regards
Markku

 

that didn't take long time at all

http://www.helpware.net/FAR/aboutfar/aboutfar.htm

and another one totally free

http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/shelpm/

I used FAR..

regards
Markku