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Re: Modular documentation

Subject: Re: Modular documentation
From: "Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "Sarah Bouchier" <Sarah -dot- Bouchier -at- exony -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 18:40:16 +0530

Well, there are many ways to do single-sourcing, and what you need is
conditional text. FrameMaker does that, and is reputed to do it well.

If you/the company need to stay with Word, though, check out
http://livelinx.com/contentmanagement/conditional-text.html .
Their plugin didn't meet our exact needs because the client had already
taken us down a different road, but if you're planning on maintaining one or
more humongous docs, and conditionally publishing portions of it, this
plugin should work great for you. At $179 (IIRC), it's cheaper than buying a
Frame license - though you're still stuck with Word's idiosyncrasies. You
can download a 30-day trial copy and put it through its paces.

As a plus, I can vouch for the quick response of their team to the mails we
sent them - even when it turned out we would need something *more* than
their plugin offered.

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with LiveLinx, other than as a
potential user of their product(s).

Regards,
Ed.

On 9/20/06, Sarah Bouchier <Sarah -dot- Bouchier -at- exony -dot- com> wrote:


Hi guys,

I'd +love+ some advice on documentation tools for producing modular
documentation.

As of next month, my company are moving over to using a single code base
to produce all their products, so they can produce plain X, X with Y, X
with Z, X with client A branding etc without having to work on four
different versions of the code.

Obviously, I'd like to do the same with the documentation. I can't use
the simple expedient of having a document for X plus add-on documents
for Y and Z, as adding Y and Z change a raft of things (providing
additional options and the like) within the main product.

What I'm going to need, therefore, is a source user manual with +all+
the information in it, from which I can select whether to output any of
the above combinations.

I'm aware that this can be done with RoboHelp (being both lazy and
apparently psychic, I already set it up to do this with our online
help), but a) most of our manuals are currently in Word, and I've been
given to understand that the conversion is a pig and b) if there's a
better tool to use, since I'm going to be having to convert almost all
our docset anyway, this is the time to change to it.

The company is almost certain to go with whatever I suggest - after this
week, I'll be the only technical author here, and I report directly to
both the VP of Engineering and the COO - so I want to make the +right+
decision, as I and anyone else we take on in the future will be stuck
with it :-)

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References:
Modular documentation: From: Sarah Bouchier

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