BarTender Help System
Tools Used: MadCap Flare, Lingo, Capture and Contributor, Perforce, SDL Trados, HTML, CSS, Paint.NET
When I started as a Technical Writer at Seagull, all of the documentation was maintained and compiled using HTML Help Workshop. For those technical writers who have been around a while, HTML Help Workshop created CHM files, or compressed help windows that are directly integrated into the software product. It was discontinued in 2003, over a decade ago.
While I wanted to modernize the documentation tech stack, the fact remained that we needed to keep the CHM files for backwards compatibility. I initiated the migration of our docs to MadCap Flare, a Help Authoring Tool (HAT)that solved many of our documenatation woes. The use of MadCap Flare ensured we could create multiple output formats (CHM and HTML), reduce the headache of outdated and unsupported tools, simplify our compilation process, and standardize writing processes. The migration required:
- Setting up a revision control system in Perforce
- Creating a MadCap Flare project to handle 2000+ content pages
- Defining a process to create CHM files
- Modernizing our deliverables by creating an online help system in addition to the CHM output
- Optimizing the web output for desktop, tablet and mobile viewers
- Working with localization vendors to integrated SDL Trados with MadCap Lingo for translations
I'd love to be able to share the entire project with you, but unfortunately, it is not in the public domain. Please contact me for any questions; I'd be happy to discuss in detail my role in this project!
