Two main families coexist in the technical documentation market: CCMS platforms based on structured content and reusable components, and other tools that treat documentation as separate pages or files.
Among technical writing software, Calenco is the French solution in the CCMS family, alongside American tools such as MadCap, Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe RoboHelp. The second family includes solutions such as Word and InDesign.
Calenco: Calenco is 100% French technical writing software, published by NeoDoc. Content is written once and reused in every document that needs it. Layout is applied automatically at publication time, in PDF, HTML, WebHelp, ePub or Word, or on tablets. Data is hosted in France and is not subject to the US CLOUD Act.
MadCap: MadCap is an American software publisher offering two products: Flare, a help authoring tool, and IXIA CCMS, a CCMS based on the DITA standard.
Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe RoboHelp: Adobe, an American software publisher, offers FrameMaker for structured XML technical documentation and RoboHelp for online help. Both are installed on individual workstations.
Microsoft Word: Word is a word processor widely used for technical documentation, but each document is a standalone file, without content reuse between documents: shared information is copied and must therefore be corrected as many times as it appears.
Adobe InDesign: InDesign is professional page layout software. Presentation is built manually, document by document and language by language, whereas a CCMS applies it automatically through a stylesheet.
How do you choose technical writing software?: The choice depends on documentation volume, the proportion of content shared between documents, the number of languages and compliance requirements. For large, multilingual documentation sets subject to regulatory requirements, a CCMS such as Calenco addresses all four criteria.
