There are as many technical writing niches as there are industries. Me? I write and manage user help for a company that builds software products on the Salesforce platform.
When I was first hired several years ago, I migrated our user help documentation from Google Docs to a dedicated website. I chose OxygenXML for source files because structured authoring is an industry standard, and this tool was the least expensive option available at the time. It still is to this day.
OxygenXML allows you to easily publish guides to a web-ready format. This is the main output I use, though it’s a robust omnichannel publishing tool and can do much more than that.
At the same time it’s not the best website builder out there. (Static site generators do a much better job at creating strictly online documentation websites.) Plus, OxygenXML hasn’t updated its web templates in many years. So I’ve been finding ways to customize the WebHelp output to make it more of a site building tool.
I’m happy to report that this is possible. I’ve been tooling around a lot lately with the software to customize it for our needs, and I’m looking forward to posting about that here. Stay tuned :).
