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Subject:Re: any useful doc tools in Zendesk? From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 27 Oct 2016 11:56:37 -0700
The good news is Paligo can now publish to Zendesk articles.
The bad news is it really works only for single topics.
If you have a complicated document with several levels of topics, all
the subtopics are folded into the top-level parent topic. For example,
I have several hundred topics in a single document that we distribute
as a ~350-page PDF and online help. The top-level topics are basically
book titles: Programmer's Guide, Administrator's Guide, etc. On export
to Zendesk, all the topics in the Programmer's Guide got dumped into a
single file.
To make matters worse, all cross-references are converted to static
text. Paligo adds "the section called" before the topic name, but
there's no way to tell which top-level file contains that topic. My
docs are extensively cross-referenced (that's one of the reasons
they're distributed as a single PDF or help system), so the Zendesk
version is pretty much impossible to navigate.
This is apparently a limitation of Zendesk, so there's probably
nothing Paligo can do about it.
Even with these limitations, it should be very useful for some users.
On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> wrote:
> We're looking at Zendesk.
>
> Is there anything in there that I should evaluate for possible use by docs?
>
> Do any authoring tools integrate with it in useful ways?
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