Which authoring tools do Technical Writers use

I thought I should do a survey of how many people have moved on to the idea whose time has probably come: Technical Documentation in the Cloud. I started a survey in the group Technical Writers of India. Some very good responses came through, but it seems the move to technical writing in the cloud hasn’t started happening as yet. Most people are still using old school desktop applications to author content.

One of the concerns that I have heard from people is that they want to own their technical content and not hand it over to a third-party vendor’s cloud. But then a thought came to my mind:

We keep hearing about new technical writing tools, how markdown is the tech-writing currency of the future, and how authoring+hosting+analytics. I started a survey in the Technical Writers of India group to find out which help authoring tools our fellow tech writers are using.

I got two main surprises in the results:

• Number of Madcap Flare users were far less than: Adobe FrameMaker, MSWord, or Arbortext.

• Very few people have started using technical documentation in the cloud.