New Markdown (AsciiDoc) Editor, Improved Zendesk Publish, and More...

Wouldn’t it be great if technical writers and “non-writers” could live together in perfect harmony? Well, read on…

Paligo is, as you probably know, using the XML format for enabling powerful single-sourcing and reuse of content. This is great for technical writers, who need all that power to accomplish advanced things with complex technical documentation.

But sometimes they need input from others – usually “non-writers”, like software developers for example. Such non-writers may not always be as thrilled about getting into all the details of structured authoring, working with elements, filters, variables, reusable components, etc. They just want to quickly write down a draft of what they know about their particular expertise and leave it to the technical writer to handle all the fancy structured authoring stuff.

They need something like markdown, the popular simple text-based format that is used everywhere these days, from email clients, to Github and popular task management tools like Trello.

Well, guess what: That’s exactly what the new “Markdown Editor” is all about!

To be precise, we call it the Markdown Editor although is really based on AsciiDoc – a more full-featured variant of the markdown family of formats. But AsciiDoc is hard to say so we chose to give it a simpler name 🙂

This light-weight editor makes it possible for anyone to contribute draft content in a simple text format, which is then automatically converted to full-fledged XML for the Technical Author to put the finishing touches on.

The best thing of all, you as the Technical Author are still fully in control. You have the full power of the full-featured XML editor, and you decide what topics you want from your Contributors. Then you add the bells and whistles using all the structured authoring features of Paligo. You just get draft input in a very structured and easy way.

So if you’ve ever wished there was a Component Content Management System and authoring platform that offered both full XML-based single-sourcing and simple markdown possibilities, don’t hesitate, try it out today.

We think you are going to love it!

The help desk publishing feature has quickly become really popular to share reused content with your support team.

One of these is the Zendesk publishing, and we have put some extra effort into improving it further. This update makes it much easier to update articles you published before, and resolving links in a much better way.

You also have more options now on how to divide your publications into articles in Zendesk!

This is just the beginning, and if you haven’t tried out how easy it can be to both work with complex documentation in a professional and structured way, as well as share that content with your support team, now’s the time!

You will love this if you’ve ever started out creating a section, a warning or other admonition as a regular element inside a topic. Then you decided it would be better as a reusable topic. Sometimes you don’t know from the beginning.

Well now you can convert it into a reusable component with a single command, making reuse even more easy!