Example of API documentation portal using MadCap Flare

This post follows on from our Creating an API documentation portal with MadCap Flare and Swagger/OpenAPI post. It shows screenshots of a test project we created. We used Swagger’s “petstore” example API specification as the source content. We didn’t spend any time modifying the stylesheets – these are just proofs of concept. API documentation Home page… Read more »

Creating an API documentation portal with MadCap Flare and Swagger/OpenAPI

MadCap Software has published a whitepaper called The Definitive Guide to Creating API Documentation. It covers ten best practices for writers, and it describes how you can use MadCap Flare to implement these when you are writing API documentation. In this post, we’ll look at whether we can combine automatically generated REST API reference documentation with… Read more »

Perfecting collaborative authoring for online Help

Yesterday, I wrote: “There are some activities that seem like they always could be improved. One is creating an authoring environment where professional technical communicators and other staff can work together.” Writing online Help is different from writing some other types of content, in that it involves topic-based authoring. Content is stored in modular, re-usable and flexible… Read more »

Using Markdown to create a boilerplate document for reports and proposals

Following on from our post Cutting and pasting content into Word documents – Is there a better way?, we’ve been looking at how organisations could use Markdown to create reports and proposals more quickly and consistently. The objective was to: Create something simple for non-technical people to use. Have a collection of re-usable chunks of content that… Read more »

Stack Overflow is moving into documentation (get the popcorn)

Stack Overflow, a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers, has announced its plans to add documentation to the site: “Lately we’ve been asking ourselves “what else could we do to improve developers’ lives on the internet?”. Jeff’s original announcement of Stack Overflow said this: There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums,… Read more »