A Help Authoring Tool or HAT is a software program used by

technical writer A technical writer is a professional communicator whose task is to convey complex information in simple terms to an audience of the general public or a very select group of readers. Technical writers research and create information through a vari ...

s to create

online help Online help is a form of user assistance that provides topic-oriented, procedural or reference information designed to assist in using a software application, web application or operating system. Online help linked to the application's state ( ...

systems.

Functions

The basic functions of a Help Authoring Tool (HAT) can be divided into the following categories:

File input

HATs obtain their source text either by importing it from a file produced by another program, or by allowing the author to create the text within the tool by using an editor. File formats that can be imported vary from HAT to HAT. Acceptable file formats can include

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, OpenOffice Writer and

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

, and compiled Help formats such as Microsoft WinHelp and Microsoft Compiled HTML Help.

Help output

The output from a HAT can be either a compiled Help file in a format such as WinHelp (*.HLP) or Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (*.CHM), or noncompiled file formats such as Adobe

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

or JavaHelp.

Auxiliary functions

Some HATs provide extra functions such as: * Automatic or assisted

Index Index (: indexes or indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on the Halo Array in the ...

generation * Automatic

Table of Contents A table of contents (or simply contents, abbreviated as TOC), is a list usually part of the Book design#Front matter, front matter preceding the main text of a book or other written work containing the titles of the text's sections, sometimes with ...

* Spelling checker * Image editing * Image hotspot editing * Import and export of text in

files, for exchange with

computer-assisted translation Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software, also known as a translator, to assist a human translator in the translation process. The tr ...

programs

Common help authoring tools

Some common HATs include: * HelpNDoc *

Adobe RoboHelp Adobe RoboHelp is a help authoring tool developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows. RoboHelp was created by Gen Kiyooka, and Blue Sky Software released version 1.0 in January 1992. Blue Sky Software was founded in 1990 and changed its n ...

* HelpSmith * Doc-To-Help * MadCap Flare * Help & Manual * Sandcastle *

AsciiDoc AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook XML, but using plain text mark-up conventions. AsciiDoc documents can be created using any text editor and read “as-is”, or rendered to HTML or any other fo ...

Related software

Technical writers often use

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

s and

version control system Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code ...

s to manage their work.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Help Authoring Tool Technical communication Technical communication tools Help authoring tools