The Technical Author Departs

We continued on, then, deferring work on the documentation until at least we had frozen the user interface. Then the technical author left. She'd landed a full-time editing position on a magazine.

Again, I volunteered to work on the documentation. By now the engineering manager had succeeded in selling the idea of switching documentation tools to higher management.

Version 1.0 was due to be released in two weeks. We had four choices:

Ship with the existing documentation—which was dangerously out of date.
Stub out the documentation entirely, so at least users wouldn't be misled by it.
Revise the Microsoft Word document, use Word Doctor to generate HTML, reconnect the HTML to the Product.
Rewrite the manual using DocBook.

We ruled out the first choice even though it required the least effort. The second seemed like an admission of defeat—could we seriously consider releasing a formal version of the Product without documentation? Noone present had any enthusiasm for the third choice.

So, finally, with less than a fortnight until code-freeze, I got assigned the task of finishing the documentation using the tools of my choosing.