Large documents become to cumbersome with a word processor. An additional part of desktop publishing concerns distribution. Adobe Acrobat is the standard means of distributing documents on disk or online. It is not difficult to use, but many companies desire knowledge of the application. Both require knowledge of Word.
Online help requires different writing skills than needed to write a user manual.
The material must be much more concise, with short sentences. Procedures should have a maximum of 5 steps. Indexing is also very important in online help, since the index is the way most people find their help information. Graphics Many technical writing jobs now require the ability to also do graphical design. There does not seem to be a real standard in this area, although many use Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop.