Editing in Eclipse

[owilkes]

Hi All,
Suspecting this could be a question for Madcap themselves, as it may be licensing related. There are lots of categories such as Web Based, Printed, Dotnet and CHM but not Eclipse so am writing it here...

Its hard enough to get our programmers to document anything, let alone ask them to do documentation outside their Eclipse IDE ('why can't we just comment the code and you can extract that' might have been mentioned before). So asking them to stop developing, and write some documentation in a different system is not the ideal world. They use Eclipse as their IDE, so the eclipse publishing plugin looks like it will be a godsend, but... what about editing the content in Eclipse. Madcap will of course want some revenue for this, but how is it/would it be done? Is there an editor plugin we could use, as well as a reader?

Thanks.

[RamonS]

Why don't the developers write their code in Flare? How come it is always tech writers and QA who have to compromise?

[owilkes]

Understand the irritation, but unfortunately, Flare doesn't have a code compiler. And sadly, over the years, they have proved that while you can ship code without documentation, and get (poor) results, if you ship documentation without the code it gets even worse. Over a barrel a bit on that one.

[RamonS]

I know, but my point is that there are tools for writing code and tools for writing documentation. If devs do not want to use the right tools for the task then why should others bend over backwards to comfort them? Have them use Flare or a different documentation tool that makes imports into Flare easy. If it is one of the gazillion IDEs out there, so be it, but there are better things to do than support them all through Flare.
Sorry...I'm not helping here.

[SteveS]

Why don't the developers write their code in Flare? How come it is always tech writers and QA who have to compromise?

You're not suggesting the devs don't value our contribution are you?

[RamonS]

Why don't the developers write their code in Flare? How come it is always tech writers and QA who have to compromise?

You're not suggesting the devs don't value our contribution are you?

Most devs I met do not even know that tech writers exist. In all fairness, some tech writers deserve to be ignored, but that's a different issue.

[SteveS]

Most devs I met do not even know that tech writers exist. In all fairness, some tech writers deserve to be ignored, but that's a different issue.[/quote]
Most devs I've met think technical writing is dumping their code into a pdf...

...and single sourcing is running a pdf through some code they developed to create html for webhelp.

Sheesh.

[owilkes]

Thanks for your, erm...advice. I share the frustration, but also try to balance it with the reality. While coding the functionality behind a field, if they had one window for the code, the other for the documentation, both submitted together - much more likely to get something out of them. Which the doc team would read, grimace and rewrite as something comprehensible.

What will probably happen is - they will write a utility to write/edite the .html topics from the IDE - directly into the Flare documentation set. Minumal functionality, just text. Doc team will then import, republish nightly, and improve in due course through Flare. MadCap won't benefit from this - was just wondering if there's any pricing model/better solution for plugging Contributor (for example) in.

You may now continue to howl at the moon....