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> I find it hard to believe that Adobe's product managers have ever
> spent much time talking with technical writers and documentation
> managers about our needs.
Really? You must not follow a lot of techcomm traffic outside this
listserv then. RJ (the TCS product manager) is highly visible and
approachable.
> Help 2 is a requirement in certain development environments, I forget
> which (Visual Studio .NET?), but a company my old employer acquired
> had had to move some of their docs to it.
It's only for VS.NET, yes, but isn't a requirement for the technology.
It was never formally released as a format, and was only supported by
MS with the release of Sandcastle after the head developer (and only
remaining developer) for nDoc quit development (which he'd been doing
for free) after being harassed by too many people. Too bad, because he
was a nice guy who had a genuine interest in providing a solid code
documentation tool for C# developers.
> Same goes for Eclipse help. I switched my department from WebWorks to
> MIF2Go because it supported Eclipse.
Eclipse Help does have a market but it's a fairly small one (per the
most recent WritersUA Skills and Technologies survey). Unless you're
looking to cash in on a niche market, it doesn't make sense to devote
a ton of resources into development against a niche technology. Adobe
is a giant, and whether we think they're right or wrong, they will
look for the greatest bang for their development buck and will push
their own technologies whenever possible to continually grow their
adoption. It's the nature of the corporate game.
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