The Technical Writer’s “Killer App”

Everyone with an opinion talks about the “killer app” that if you didn’t have use of would cause untold stress and difficulty. The sort of application that prevents lots of sleepless nights and cold sweats by solving a difficult problem with an easy solution. In my days as a Psion PDA user it was the macro shareware that allowed you to mimic the Windows Start button to gain quick and easy access to the installed application, user folders and shortcuts and other macros you had created. It was all there with a single tap with the pen. Poetry in motion!

In the world of technical writing, the competition for that one killer application is close. Macro Express is right up there with its ability to (amongst other things) capture keystrokes and save them in a macro. So is DotColor for converting any on-screen color into a hex or RGB value. But for me, a find and replace tool just pips these to the title.

RoboHelp has a built in utility, available in the Tools pod, called Multi-File Find and Replace. This simple to use tool does a pretty good stab at the job in hand but has limitations. For a start it only searches .HTM and .TXT files. Additionally it works by searching the HTML, or XHTML/XML in the case of RoboHelp 8, and has difficulty with text strings spread across multiple lines. Anyone who has seen the HTML/XHTML/XML inside a file created in RoboHelp will soon realise just how big a problem this can be. For a really powerful tool, it is best to look elsewhere.

Two find and replace tools utilised by many Technical Writers are FAR, a shareware application written by Rob Chandler, and BK ReplacEm, a freeware utility developed by Bill Klein. Both fall into the category of “killer apps” with their ability to perform complicated searches (e.g. starting with, ending with, containing, not containing) across all file types. For me, FAR gets my vote as it can also be used as a help authoring tool and can be used to test and solve issues with projects created in RoboHelp. Only you can decide if it will work for you.