Re: least awful approach for keeping training slides up to date with core doc updates

[Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca>]

Robert,

When you last posted about this, you mentioned a couple other systems. I
guess none of them worked?

-Tony

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:22 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
wrote:

> 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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