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least awful approach for keeping training slides up to date with core doc updates
Subject:least awful approach for keeping training slides up to date with core doc updates From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 18 Feb 2016 13:22:06 -0800
I'm facing this at my current job but have been through it several times before.
Typical situation is a single-source authoring tool (Flare, FrameMaker
maybe with an add-on, or the like) that's doing fine generating online
help and PDF.
Training slides are a subset of the core docs, reformatted to 16:9,
text expurgated or condensed to fit the space, styles changed to fit
the medium. (PowerPoint is the default but we could live with anything
that could be converted to PDF.)
Usually the slides are created manually. Updates are tedious so things
tend to get out of sync.
Anyone have a good set of tools and procedures for this? If not direct
single-sourcing to slides, at least some sort of workflow that would
automate a lot of the repetitive work.
For example, something I tried that did not work. My source is in
Confluence, and I can export to Word, so I thought I'd write a
template that would reformat that into something that would need only
editing and page breaks, but it turns out the export does not use
styles except for headings, so I can't mass-reformat bulleted and
numbered lists or code listing by applying a template. Cleaning up
that stuff is less efficient than just cutting and pasting from the
source into PowerPoint.
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