Best HTML Based User Guide Writing Software

Question

I am working on a project where I need to create end-user documentation for a piece of software. At some point next year, part of the software that I am writing this documentation will be removed. Therefore, I do not want to spend a lot of time on the leadership of the professional class. This is what will take place in graduate school in college, and several professionals in the house. Although, if it’s good and useful, I can send it back to the openource community as free documentation.

I thought the HTML manual would work well. The software is written in PHP, so anyone who uses it will have a web browser open and ready to go. It also causes me or someone else to integrate the manual pages into the software.

I am not interested in creating / using a wiki for this piece of software. What I'm really looking for is a piece of software where I can write as a regular document and generate simple HTML. I know that there are pieces of software such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage, but I was particularly interested in something that simplified the process of creating documentation (where the process of capturing screens and videos is integrated along with simple image / video editing).

If you think a different approach (other than HTML documents) might be better, I'd love to hear it. If you have a different approach, and you think you know a good software solution to achieve this, let me know.

My main desires for the approach and software to achieve it

• Easy to deploy (HTML pages do not require special configuration. The help catalog can be simply expanded with all the manual pages)
• No special software needed to use (HTML can be read by everyone who has a web browser).
• Ease of use for me writing documentation / a small learning curve (I don’t want to spend a lot of time learning complex software to work with a relatively small project).
• The ability to combine text, video and images into separate documents (HTML pages obviously support displaying them together)

Thanks!

@Lie Ryan: "MediaWiki stores all the text and data (content pages, user data, system messages, etc.) in the database ...", which I want to avoid. I think the wiki is very useful, but I'm just interested in providing static data with very low overhead.

Answer 1

Whenever I need to write user manuals (which means every time I finish a project), I like to use Markdown . Combined with minimal CSS, it is very easy to use.

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, simple text format, then convert it to structurally sound XHTML (or HTML).

Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a syntax formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool written in Perl that converts plain text formatting to HTML.

Answer 2

I think this does not meet all your requirements, but I am a big Sphinx fan. You write your documentation in ReST , and you can easily create versions of HTML and PDF. HTML generation uses templates, so it’s quite customizable. In addition, there is the added benefit of having plain text versions (ReST is somewhat readable as it is) for those of us who love such things :)

Answer 3

Write a manual in XML format, use something like a docbook . This will allow you to do everything you need with the content, and then generate the presentation in your own way.

There are many tutorials for HTML docbook tools.

Edit: I forgot to mention that OO can save to a docbook .

Answer 4

I would suggest just writing it in OpenOffice and publishing it to PDF. PDF, perhaps even more than HTML, is agnostic and almost identical across multiple clients and operating systems. If you really want a video, you can link to an external website, such as Youtube or whatever, from the PDF.