Manual Writing Software

Off Topic Kitty Dump
21

[mention]MJuric[/mention] In that case I would go with Affinity Publisher as that’s what its designed to do. It’s their version of Adobe InDesign which we use in house to do large manual layouts. Hard to beat $25 ($75 if so want the whole suite).



Here is a rather long tutorial but it covers a lot of functions. The text flow is cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98cWyoStN_Q

22

It depends what I’m working on.

I use words for most “manuals” I create, but excel is also another alternative I use when creating checklists for examples. I like all the little things I can do with Excel, just don’t like the whole “layout”, how you can’t have it somewhat paginated like on Word.

Some things I create on SolidWorks, design criterias for example. I do the drawing using existing assemblies and then annotate it and add the desired dimensions.

23

Does anyone have any experience with SE 3D Publishing/Illustrations? From what I see it looks like a good option for make interactive instructions/SOPs. It would probably be overkill for a manual but I would be very much interested in using it for Instructions/SOPs.

Edit: Currently I make a drawing of the assembly with annotations, label all of the Drawing Views, then I make a set of instructions using Word and refer to the Drawing Views rather than using pics (I’ll still use pics where I can’t illustrate it with CAD.) Using SE 3D Publishing or something similar would keep everything in the same document, you could make animations and you can use interactive BOMs.

Pinging the SE gurus:
matt
Imics13
Ry-guy
TusharSuradkar

24

My user guides do not exceed 5 pages, there are more drawings than text, I use sw drawing for magic, I rarely use world sometimes inkscape.

25

Hey Zhen-Wei Tee , Thaks a lot Mate!
I’ve been reviewing this app for two days. I really like. equipped, talented, aesthetically pleasing. It’s like a private website for me.
I was using google keep, will try that too.

26

Once long ago, I bought and implemented a PDM package called Product Center. It’t a little obscure but one of the things I loved about it was that the company used their own software in their business. They used it as a CRM and support log. So within the company, almost everybody knew how to run the software as well as its strengths and weaknesses. That spoke volumes about the software.

I’ve seen the stuff SW and SE use for creating technical documentation (training and help), and in both cases, it’s ROTFLOL kind of embarrassing. Pre-2000. Looks like Windows 3.1 kind of stuff. If these companies don’t think their own technical publication software is better than embarrassing old crap, then why would I? Personally, for this reason alone, I’ve never even looked at either one.

I was contracted to write some training stuff for SW and I proposed we used the Composer thing, and was met with a wall of silence. So something is wrong. Either all the people are stupid or the software sucks, and I know the people aren’t stupid.

27

[quote=jcapriotti post_id=7959 time=1623263031 user_id=91]
@MJuric In that case I would go with Affinity Publisher as that’s what its designed to do. It’s their version of Adobe InDesign which we use in house to do large manual layouts. Hard to beat $25 ($75 if so want the whole suite).



Here is a rather long tutorial but it covers a lot of functions. The text flow is cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98cWyoStN_Q
[/quote]
Affinity Publisher can’t span columns. That may or may not be a deal breaker for some, but for what I need it currently is a problem.

Here’s the discussion starting 3 years ago:

<LINK_TEXT text=“https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index. … n-columns/”>https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/64963-span-columns/</LINK_TEXT>

28

I participated in a demo of Composer here a while back and wasn’t too impressed. It is pretty much a screenshot software on steroids. The thing that really sucks is they still use Word for the instructions themselves.
The procedure for instructions was

  1. Bring in the SW model
  2. Make Exploded Views, etc.
  3. Save out Vector and Raster images using a naming scheme
  4. Bring them into you Word doc as linked

I was pretty impressed with this video SE 3D Publisher https://solidedge.siemens.com/en/resource/video/technical-publications-in-solid-edge/. Then again it is a marketing video…
And BTW SE 3D Publishing is $400 cheaper per year subscription than Composer.