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In my opinion, Flare offers the same degree of single sourcing for most
applications.
> being able to store a fully formatted topic in Author-it
You can reuse fully formatted topics as well as fully formatted
"chunks", called snippets of text as part of topics. Reuse is done by
defining separate TOCs and associating targets with the TOCs. TOCs in
Flare are similar to Books in Ait.
> shared directory and access control: Flare supports the use of source
control by Microsoft Team Foundation Server.
In my humble opinion, one of the main differences between Flare and Ait
is the use of a database in Ait. This surely has advantages when working
with large projects and very complicated reuse of contents. I guess it
was more advantageous in the past, where computer CPU was low. Today, a
file-based structure without database is very good to be used for
not-too-big projects as well. In theory, you could set up all projects
inside one project in Flare and set up a quite complicated reuse scheme,
too, but I guess most people do not even need this. I rather like to
keep different projects (with no or very limited reuse) apart from each
other. I see one advantage in Flare concerning single source in the use
of conditional text and topics. Often, it is easier to mark topics or
text pieces as different for separate projects rather than setting up
separate TOCs. For example, if 90 % of the contents is identical over
several projects, it is easier setting up a single TOC with conditions.
Best regards, Christine
(By the way, I read the digest, so my postings may appear sometimes a
bit late.)
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