Help Guide Creation Software For MacOS

Graham Carter · February 24, 2019

As the titles suggests am looking for peoples opinions / experiences with some kind of help / guide writing application.

To expand I work for a company who has 150+ software / web based products which are administered by myself and colleagues.

We have the usual word documents with bullet points, numbered steps etc containing information on administering each product, screenshots etc.

However working with word documents and the like is troublesome to both maintain and use, especially if they are 30-40 pages long!

Im not sure what exactly it is I am looking for hence the post for suggestions.

Ideally a package which is specifically designed for such a task... ie the creation of help guides / instruction manuals as it were.

The end "guides" would need to be searchable and easy to navigate... perhaps via a screen by screen interface which would contain step1 on one screen, then step2 on the next screen etc etc

Answers on a postcard

Sauron · February 24, 2019

I don't know of any specific software for this purpose, but you may want to try markdown. Essentially, markdown lets you generate well formatted PDFs from a plain text file, which is a lot easier to maintain and share with your colleagues than a cumbersome word document.

Here's a small demo:

The table of contents is interactive and lets you navigate straight to where you need to go. Since it's a PDF, it's easily searchable and can be annotated.

2 hours ago, Graham Carter said:

The end "guides" would need to be searchable and easy to navigate... perhaps via a screen by screen interface which would contain step1 on one screen, then step2 on the next screen etc etc

This sounds a bit like a presentation - with the correct software (pandoc) you can use markdown to produce a presentation format PDF, but the interactivity is more limited than on something like a powerpoint presentation (which would do what you're describing, but would need a lot of work and would be hard to maintain).