[CASE] Hyphen project uses Dr.Explain to create a user help system as a mix of screenshots, explanatory texts, and videos

Pascal Beringer, the founder of the Hyphen project, shares his recipe of making an effective user documentation structure in Dr.Explain.

DE: Please tell us about yourself and your project.

Hyphen (www.hyphen.press) is a desktop publishing application for Windows.

I’m a self-employed developer living in Ireland, and I’m from the world of prepress. I’ve been a developer for 30 years. With my project I wanted to give everybody the opportunity to professionally produce books, magazines, brochures, or advertisements for a low financial cost and with a short learning curve.

DE: Why do you care about creating help documentation for your software, and how did you do it in the past?

Hyphen is a huge app with plenty of features. I really need to explain them to the users the easy way. First I used Sandcastle, then GhostDoc. In both cases, the outputs were not really useful for an end-user documentation. It didn’t help much the users.
I tried some other tools I found online, but they were irrelevant for me, too.

DE: How did you start using Dr.Explain software?

After testing a few applications to implement our user guide, all of which proved tedious and time consuming, I stumbled upon Dr.Explain.
And there was the miracle – in three days I wrote basic content layout and added most of the screenshots. Then I added some explanations, links to my sample videos, and internal links. It was so easy!

DE: What is the structure of your current documentation?

At first we thought we would only use online videos. But it quickly turned out to be inadequate. So I decided to go back to the classic online user manual supported by some videos with examples for the more elaborate concepts.

My users like the manual with a mix of screenshots, explanatory texts, and videos.

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