RE: Baiting for the single source rant [long]

[joemiller -at- canberra -dot- com]

Michelle,

> Single-Sourcing is not necessarily between formats.


You've made a very good and often overlooked point: document creation
is not the same as document maintenance.

Andrew, whose business is creating documents, isn't taking into
account the other half: document maintenance.  Those of us who have to
both create _and_maintain_ a fair number of documents (in our case,
about 450 of them, almost all sharing some of their content with
another document), can easily find reasons why single sourcing
increases productivity and decreasing cost and the potential of error
propagation.

Since we use Ventura Publisher to lay out our documents, it's easy to
either drag and drop or cut and paste content entities (chapters,
sections, paragraphs) as required.  But this isn't easy to automate,
nor does it guarantee error free production.  And though Ventura's
excellent HTML output capability helps in repurposing a document for
the web, and with some file manipulation, for HTML Help, it doesn't do
anything at all for sharing content entities between documents.

BUT... with Corel's purchase of Softquad, "Ventura+XML" is in our near
future, and with proper planning (the hard part <g>), it'll be
relatively painless to include any number of content entities in
multiple documents (the easy part).

Regards,
Joe Miller
Senior Editor
Canberra Industries - A Cogema Company
Meriden, Connecticut, USA
joemiller -at- canberra -dot- com

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