Is Obsidian a good tool to use for writing technical manuals? I would like to write an Operation Manual for municipality’s water system. There will be embedded screenshots and some links to other sections of the document.
Ideally we could “publish” to offline html. The customer would also like a printed manual.
If Obsidian is no good, I would love suggestions on software you have used to write short manuals with pictures, preferably not Word.
Eh. Theoretically, maybe. Practically, this is a problem of ‘what constitutes work use’.
In my opinion, the work notes I take in obsidian are my personal notes. I found obsidian myself, and use it myself for taking notes for work. Stuff doesn’t get shared to coworkers, other than the actual text I am writing when I copy paste it out of obsidian.
OP’s use case is a work use, in my opinion, as they are using obsidian to produce the output used for work.
Same would apply if a team used obsidian for notes, encouraged use of it for everyone in the team, and/or uses shared vaults as a ‘wiki’.
I also see the definition of “work use” rather fuzzy. I have discussed this on Reddit some time ago. And conclusion was: if it is somehow work related you need a license, does matter if you share your voult or on not.
Practically, obsidian does not hunt for people who use the soft without a proper license.
On the other hand obsidian is developed by 2 people, I believe 3 now.
Btw, your employer most probably will disagree with your definition of personal notes as well and the fact that you install obsidian on a work hardware.
Actually, my employer honestly does not care. My department specifically uses unmanaged devices, which we’re also explicitly allowed to use privately. The data on them is ours, we are encouraged to encrypt it with a personal key. ‘Non-personal’ data is stored on onedrive or our own gitlab instance.
But I agree with you that most employers would :)