I upgraded to Camtasia 6 at the weekend (from v4) mostly to import and edit .MOV files. These are created by my faithful Canon Powershot when I shot videos. Sony makes AVIs. The other reason was to do more heavy lifting with Camtasia. I have tons on material on the hard-disk and want to get these into screencasts. So, what the verdict?

Review Camtasia 6

Price – $149 not cheap but not as expensive as Adobe Premiere.

Key features

• Import and edit MOV files
• Independent audio edits (saves me doing audio in Audacity)
• 3D tilt (can’t find where to do this, yet) and oodles of
• Special effects

The good – What I liked

The user interface is nice, no nutty changes a Ia Microsoft Office and ribbon bars

Presets for blog, YouTube etc means it will help you produce files that best suit these formats. For simple videos, this is fine. You can do your own monkeying around as well, e.g. change frame rates.

the bad – What I don’t like

Audio enhancements are hit and miss. Sometimes makes the voice lovely and rich (hey, why not!) other times I sound like I’m under-water.

Number of un-dos seems limited. I love to un-do.

the ugly – real Problems

Freezes with files over 4 MB. These are (for me) small files, so I need to reboot all the time. Big problem. (What memory do I have? 80 GB of hard disk and 2 GB of RAM – thought that would be ok.) This is a killer. Files more than 3MB cause Camtasia to freeze. What this means is that when I try to make an AVI, MP4 or MOV for YouTube, the thing locks, usually at 19-25%. Close all apps, re-boot and try again. No joy.

Smartfocus won’t start – Camtasia thinks I’m using an older version, e.g. v5, and so won’t start it. I’m on 6. Can’t get it to work. See the error message.

MOVs won’t import – this is a horror! According to the site ‘Large MOV files not importing into Camtasia. Camtasia will crash or give a no codec message upon importing. This is a known issue that will be fixed in a future release. As a workaround, try creating smaller MOV files from other programs when bringing them into Camtasia.’ I’ve done this and still no luck. Off to contact Tech Support.

MP4s won’t import – No Codec available error message. Contact Tech Support.

FWIW I download all the codes I can find on the site, re-boot and… no joy.

What to do next?

Not sure. Have downloaded all the codecs I can find, re-booted the pc, cleared the cache, closed all apps and sent some emails to Techsmith. Now, I’m waiting…

Can you help?

If you’ve had these type of issues, can you let me know what you did to fix this?

I have a choice. Robohelp or Doc-to-Help? My client has given me permission to use whatever tool I want to do the next batch of tech docs — and they’ll buy the software. No cost to me. Which one should I choose?

Robohelp or Doc-to-Help

Doc-to-Help was the first help authoring tool (HAT) I used in my technical writing career. We’re talking quite a while back now. Since then Robohelp has overtaken it as the tool of choice for technical writers, especially as it’s now owned by Adobe and bundled with its Technical Communications software pack.

For Doc-to-Help

• I feel this product is under-estimated. Other technical writers (more knowledgeable than me about HATs) recommend it.
• Opportunity to broaden my skillsets (self-interest here and not to the client’s advantage!)
• Rapid response from Component 1 (product owners) when I contacted them. Very helpful. Only Techsmith (esp Betsy Weber) were more helpful.

Against Doc-to-Help

• Price is not cheap
• Will there be enough qualified Doc-to-Help experts to take over this project when I move on?
• Does it integrate with other technical writing apps and/or Microsoft Word?
• Worried about lack of community support, i.e. from other technical writers, if I need help.

For Robohelp

• Oceans of Doc-to-Help experts to take over this project
• Part of the Adobe Tech Communication suite. Maybe get discount.
• Arguably the industry standard
• Plenty of tutorials online if I get stuck

Against Robohelp

• Price
• Concern that there is no real advantage in getting the Tech Communication suite anyway as we (i.e. the client) won’t use it once I’ve left
• Found the user interface horrible to work with last time. Admittedly, this was four years ago but you know how these things stick.

Another alternative is Madcap Flare.

What do you think?

If you were in my shoes, what would you do?

Image: Wikipedia

Of all the technical writing tools I’ve used over the years, Epic Editor was probably the most impressive, especially when it came to doing tech documents that involved DocBook and Dita. It was difficult to learn – no point pretending otherwise – but once I got the hang of it, I used it non-stop for over 2 years. Then I switched companies are haven’t had the opportunity to use it again. With that in mind, here is a brief intro to EPIC Editor, Ivan’s favorite XML Authoring Software!

Update:  Epic Editor is now called Arbortext Editor. You can learn more over here: http://www.ptc.com/products/arbortext-editor

Document Types

First up, let’s define a document type. According to EPIC it “refers to a collection of files that together create an application for creating and publishing documents.”

Examples of different document types include:

• Schema or DTD
• Stylesheet(s)
• Sample and template instances
• Configuration files
• Programming files that further customize the authoring or publishing environment

Document Types available

EPIC Editor supports the following types:

ATI XML DocBook — version of the DocBook DTD extended to provide profiling and equation editing.

• ATI Simplified XML DocBook Article — extended to provide profiling and equation editing.
• ATI Very Simple XML DocBook Article is a schema-based (.xsd) XML document type based on the ATI Simple XML DocBook Article. This document type has no DTD.
• ATI Catalog is an Arbortext-developed document type, based on DocBook 4.0, for catalog applications.
• Article is an article format based on ISO 12083.
• DITA Concept, Reference, Task, and Topic — the primary categories used for technical documentation.
• Book – book format based on ISO 12083.
• DocBook V4.0 – used for computer software documentation.
• News Release – format for preparing news releases.
• Correspondence – for business letter or memo format with several styles to choose from.
• General Purpose Document  - reports, books, and other types of documents.
• ATI-MIL-M-38784C – CALS standard document type.
• HTML V4.01 – for publishing information on the web.
• XHTML V1.0.
• Free-form XML – for creating valid XML documents that do not have schema or DTD declarations.
• ASCII  - standard unformatted text character set.

How does it work?

The interface is simple and lets you get at the XML tags very easily.

This screenshot shows the results of a test on the clarity of the document (ie its readability) and the number of words.

Next is the toolbar.

This offers a range of features that should keep most all Technical Writers satisfied if they want to develop nice, compliant XML and DocBooks.

Note that you can create tags, split sections, insert tags, and check their integrity.

EPIC Editor won’t let you add tags if they are in the wrong sequence. It this sense it can be very unforgiving – but it is simply trying to retain the integrity of the underlying code. Once you understand how XML works, it gets much more intuitive.

You can also import text files from your PC and add them to the document set.

Once you have the document ready, you can compile it to Windows Help or transform it to:

• ASCII
• DITA
• Docbook source
• XHTML

You can also add entities and prolog definitions, but this is more for advanced users.

Tip: you can also select part of the text and validate it only.

Here you can insert markups into the content, usually as tags.

Preferences

You can configure it in different ways. For example, you can ask it to show Attributes, Comments, and Tag prompts. Whichever suits your style of working.

This gives you an idea of how it checks the xml code. Work your way through the errors and fix each one after reviewing it.

Like I said, I haven’t used this for a while. Let me know if you’ve used it recently and seen any changes.

How does it compare to other technical writing tools you have used?