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The Tech Writer's Toolbox



What tools do you need to succeed as a technical writer? Often, you need to know whatever tools your company chooses to use. As we discussed above, browse the want ads for technical writers and make a note of what software tool familiarity they are calling for. The catch-22 is, the average writer (especially one who is looking for a job, may not be able to afford to buy several software tools just to learn how to use them. Your best bet, again, may be to familiarize yourself as much as possible with the free trial software you can download. If you have a basic familiarity with the tools in wide use, you can get up to speed once you get hired and learn what tool fits your new company's system. In any case, here's an overview of the tools that technical writers are using and some links to find out more about them.

Code



HTML, XML, Javascript

Do you need to know markup languages or code to be a technical writer? Not necessarily, but it doesn't hurt. Let's take a closer look at what all these initials stand for in case they're new to you, then we'll talk about which ones you should learn more about and why.

HTML and CSS

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is the lingua franca of the Web. HTML is a coding system that tells a web browser how to organize content on a page. HTML is a cross platform language, since it is designed to work with any web browser and any operating system.


One way to get an idea of what HTML looks like is to view it running behind any web page. When you're surfing the Internet, you can view the source code behind any web page by clicking on the View drop down box on your browser, then selecting View Source or Page Source. If you select one of these, your browser will open a new window containing a bunch of text and symbols.

This section of code is from the head section of a web page, so none of it is actually visible when the page is displayed, but it nonetheless gives information about the page to the browser and to any web spiders that may come across it to index it for the search engines.

The CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a companion to HTML and exists side by side with it. While HTML tells the browser how to structure the text on the page, CSS, tells it how the page should look. Information about page color, text font and color, text size, and other matters of appearance are written in CSS.

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