Ashish Gupta
A categorized list of OSS and/or free tools that can be useful to create some sort of documentation or technical writing work by techcomm professionals.
MediaWiki is a free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now also used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.
Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
A list of the various software for creating reference documentation from your JavaScript source files.
The official home page of the Apache OpenOffice open source project, home of OpenOffice Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Base.
LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, "finger painting" font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output - or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced - looks like nothing else.
LibreOffice is the free power-packed open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs.
Scribus is an Open Source program that brings professional page layout to Linux, BSD UNIX, Solaris, OpenIndiana, GNU/Hurd, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4, eComStation, and Windows desktops with a combination of press-ready output and new approaches to page design.
Underneath a modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as color separations, CMYK and spot colors, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation.
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.
This is the official home page for DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide . The definitive guide is the official documentation for DocBook. The latest edition covers DocBook V5.0. It was published by O'Reilly Media and XML Press. In support of DocBook users everywhere, this book and its source XML are available online.
List of vector graphics editors and software for various OSes. This is an uber list, so filter for OSS.
Software to capture your screen and create screenshots. May or may not offer in-build lite image editor. This is an uber list, so filter for OSS.
PDFCreator Features Security Disallow printing and modifications on your documents Protect your documents with a password Encrypt your files with AES and up to 128 Bit.
Blender is free 3D modeling software that allows you to create animations. Blender is a cost-effective alternative to 3D Studio Max. Blender is open source, and can be freely distributed and used according to the GNU GPL guidelines. Blender allows you to create 3D models, apply meshes, lighting effects and shading, and perform many tasks related to creating gaming and modeling visualizations. Blender also allows you to integrate python scripts to manipulate objects.
Use it for audio recording and editing. It is cross platform and can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Use Audacity to record, import and export files to various formats, edit files, and apply special effects. Audacity can be used commercially. Additionally, Audacity has a very popular and enthusiastic user community and extensive help materials.
A list of various software capable of creating CSS documentation in the pattern of other API docs using comments in the stylesheets.
Ashish has several years of experience working with content. He is a technical communicator and a community builder by profession; UX advocate and a quality champion by nature; and a Chemical engineer from IIT Bombay by academic qualification.
In his spare time he likes to spoil his son silly, test workflows, identify usability enhancements and new features in software that he uses, and indulge in the online communities. Other interests areas in which Ashish dabbles are Instructional content, eLearning, social media, SEO, project management, life skills, watching soccer, fantasize about running long marathons some day, and occasionally trekking in the Himalayas.
