Framemaker takes the distinction of the first Help Authoring Tool, having been around since the early 90’s. It almost held monopoly for several years as the Technical Writer’s most sought after editor and it is far superior to MS Word. It was used to write the Maintenance Manuals for the Boeing 777 project. Adobe purchased it in 1995. With the onset of other HATS Framemaker may have lost its market but it is still a force to reckon with when it comes to Editors for creating robust documentation. Many companies even to this day use the  “Structured” version called “Structured Framemaker”. Framemaker has a somewhat steep learning curve to master it though.

What a beautiful piece of Software from the beautiful country of Austria. Trying out Help & Manual happened out of sheer necessity. Anyone who has worked with the dreaded Robohelp for Word will know the ordeal of having to put up with innumerable system hangs and retrieving files from backup. Help & Manual literally saved the day by helping me convert all Robohelp for Word projects of the company into Winhelp (now defunct) projects in a breeze. Ever since I have been hooked on to this piece of Software. No wonder it was my Help Authoring Tool of choice when I made my first course on Technical Writing. EC Software was also kind enough to give me a free license for version 7.5 when I showed them my course. And now after being provided with a license for version 8 (22 Jan, 2022), I will be making a new course for version 8 as well.

For many years Robohelp reigned as the No.1 Technical Writer’s tool till it went on a hiatus giving rise to its main competitor madcap Flare. It is making a comeback and thanks to its original clientele it is being received well. It’s current development is being done and maintained in India.

This software comes from France and it is entirely free for personal use. Going by the looks of the application it looks very much like Help & Manual but unlike Help & Manual it does not come with an image capturing or editing tool. It’s .pdf creating ability is also not as powerful and flexible as Help & Manual’s but its free usage gives wannabe Technical Writers the time to practise and study the software well and at their own pace.  With HelpNDoc you can even generate output for Markdown and the QT Framework. 

Literally “The King” when it comes to image capturing software. Nothing even comes close. Edit, Crop, Annotate, Add Callouts and Pointers, Blur and lot more useful functions are easy to perform. You can also take screenshots of scrolling pages if your images exceed the size of your desktop screen. You can also create videos with this software though I wouldn’t recommend it for video.

For all your logos you don’t need any fancy software to purchase when you can do them all with Canva. Even the logo of learntechwritingfast.com (not a complex one) was designed using Canva. Just not logos, but brochures, folders, posters, invites, FB and Instagram picture posts, the sky is the limit when it comes to designing custom graphics. All for free though premium kits will cost you. 

Open source and therefore free! It is probably the only image capturing software that can take screenshots of scrolling webpages like Snagit but it can do that on Explorer only.

Yes, the same company that brings you Snagit. In fact I used Camtasia to create all the videos of my Technical Writing course. and all the videos of my YouTube Music channel.